Laura Tyson, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, explaining why the Clinton administration reduced its 1993 growth projection from 3.1 percent to 2 percent:

We are now looking at a future from here, and the future we were looking in February now includes some of our past, and we can incorporate the past into our forecast. 1993, the first half, which is now the past and was the future when we issued our first forecast, is now over.

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The following letter was received by Anne Ruggles Gere, Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Executive Committee, and reprinted in the September 1993 newsletter of the National Council of Teachers of English:

My request, I believe, is a small but important one. I respectfully ask that the CCCC Executive Committee replace the phallologocentric term "dissemination," which appears in "Basic Rules for the Handling of Resolutions at the Annual Business Meeting," found on page 147 of the program for the CCCC meeting.

I realize that the term may not be that offensive to some people. However, my reading and my discussions with people make me know that some do find the use of "dissemination" offensive.

I make this request because I feel that CCCC should take a strong leadership on such matters. Because language is our field of study, we should be extremely sensitive to the perceptions of people who feel that certain kinds of language exclude them.

I will suggest "distribution" as a substitute term, but you may have other preferences.

—Duane H. Roen
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona

[Ed.: While we're at it, what about the word 'nurture,' which is also gender-specific?]

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Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift commenting on the Malibu wildfires on "The McLaughlin Group," October 30, 1993. The temperature the night the fire started reached a low of 58 degrees:

If you step back and you get away from the very dramatic pictures on television, there is really no loss of life, [and] most of the communities that have been hit are wealthier and there is going to be insurance recovery... One of the fires was started by a homeless man trying to keep warm. It represents the strains in our society, from neglect to the nihilism, the 'burn, baby' nihilism of people who actually go and start fires like this.

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