Tribesman Blunders
Village Goat proofreads annual

In January, our college reached an extraordinary milestone in celebrating its 175th anniversary since it's founding in 1826. And the staff of the Tribesman, the school's annual, led the cheers and shouts of approbation by proudly displaying the anniversary's logo on the cover of their masterpiece yearbook. Many students have reached the conclusion, however, that the staff accidentally left off an intended subtitle to their work-"Happy Birthday, MC! This took us two whole days!"

Obviously, the Tribesman staff could not imagine a more eloquent way to ring-in the grand birthday than to produce a yearbook that alone contained enough spelling and mechanical errors to exceed the total number of errors in every other volume of the Tribesman combined since the college's inception. (This writer believes that the staff actually brought in the village goat to proofread the final copy-but that's just an opinion-and opinions don't belong in journalism.)

If a reader seeks to find an error in this, the 95th volume of the Tribesman, he need not look further than page 1 where two typos appear within the school's alma mater. The fact that we can come 175 years and still not know how to write the alma mater causes some to wonder how we ever made it this far-as if students are actually going to read the alma mater this time anyway after ignoring it so often before every football game.

Moving on, page 23 begins the "Who's Who In American Universities and Colleges" section. By scanning the pictures, it becomes clear that we apparently still don't know "who's who" because half of the names don't even have pictures to correspond. Rather, the names flaunt vacant picture frames that contain the text "not pictured." Well, it's obvious that they're not pictured. That's why there's no picture. This is the reason some students believe that the "not pictured" frame is in actuality a cover-up for a much broader conspiracy. If people begin to realize that "Who's Who" is not fulfilling its purpose of telling them "who's who," "Who's Who" will be…..through.

On page 31, three photographs of deserted campus scenes are highlighted by the headline, "Congratulations Class of 2001." Readers can only reach two conclusions: 1) the seniors were so eager to get off campus, that they didn't stick around for these pictures, or 2) the rapture. Dr. Bryson adamantly contends that the latter is not the case.

Next comes the section of the annual on academic clubs and organizations. I shudder to think of how many grammatical mistakes appear in the descriptions of these clubs through the seemingly infinite number of pages in this section. The best advice I can give the Tribesman staff is the following: Remember that sentences can only have one period. That's right. One period. The sentence only ends once. A second period is not necessary, and it does not emphasize the termination of the sentence to a greater extent. And if you choose to use two periods at the end of a sentence, as the Tribesman staff does quite often, a period at the beginning of the sentence does not cancel one of them out (see Pre-Law Club, page 44).

Just when one thinks mistakes are becoming less prevalent, readers reach page 118. This page contains a picture of a prominent dean of housing. However, in a reversal of what had been occurring with the "Who's Who" pictures, this photo is not accompanied by a name. I must hand it to you--these blunders get more and more erroneous the more you flip the pages. Does the Tribesman staff not realize that a picture without a caption, or vice versa, is like a ship without a sail, a dog without a bone, a dorm without a waterfall, quad grass without green spray paint?

By the time this reporter reached page 119 of the yearbook-where the individual photos of faculty, staff, and students appear-the situation looked so bleak that I could not justify becoming more grieved by the absurdity. Another reason for ending the evaluation at this juncture is that the Weekly staff does not possess omniscient abilities concerning the spelling of people's names or the activities in which the graduating seniors involved themselves during their time at MC. (Just at a glance, though, I'm rather certain that Larry Bounds was not a Homecoming maid during his freshman and senior years.)

So, the final count of typos, grammatical, and spelling errors through page 118 of this year's Tribesman came to an astounding 128 mistakes. It's as if the staff were actually making these mistakes intentionally.

But we have not lost hope. Rumor has it that the two individuals that have been selected to execute next year's Tribesman each have excellent credentials. Given the current situation, anyone who has passed English Comp 101 is looking good to me. As long as they know how to spell "rehearse" and can come up with a better way of laying out the sports pages than this year's ever popular "let's just make the pictures crooked" method, we'll see improvement. -- E.Z. Cheese

Disclaimer: The Whittington Weekly is an unofficial student page, in no way related to the official Mississippi College home page. The stories contained within this site are meant for humor and satire purposes only and attempt to bring to the surface some of the lighter aspects of campus life. The writers/students have the utmost respect for the  faculty and staff and appreciate all of their hard work to better our education. Remember, parody is the highest form of flattery. Any coincidental resemblance to the truth is predominantly fleeting.

Comments? E-mail us. © Copyright 2001