Incomplete

Pick a season and dress accordingly

There’s no denying it — Tucson weather is weird. You might wake up and have to throw on a parka and long underwear to brave the freezing winds on your walk to your 8 a.m. class, then be able to catch some rays outside in a bikini by noon. It’s hard to know what clothing you’ll need throughout the day.

However, some students seem to be responding to this conundrum with, ahem, “”creative”” outfits. The worst of these, of course, is the perennially tacky fuzzy boots (Uggs or knock-offs) and Daisy Dukes. Individually, each of these items of clothing constitutes a questionable fashion choice, but together, they’re atrocious. There has to be a better choice than to walk around campus looking like a snow bunny who has misplaced her pants.

Women aren’t the only culprits when it comes to schizophrenic clothing choices. Men, too, can be spotted sporting tank tops under hooded sweatshirts. If you’re cold, might we suggest sleeves?

Although they’re responses to unpredictable weather patterns, these ensembles earn an all-too-fitting grade of incomplete.

Pass

Give thanks for benevolent class-cancellers

Technically, the university has only canceled classes on Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday. This leaves many students in a lurch, especially those who have several hours of travel time and a lot of groping by airport security separating them from Thanksgiving dinner.

Luckily, many professors have found it in their hearts to cancel Wednesday classes, allowing students plenty of time to get home before Thursday’s festivities. Some have even called off lessons all week — a veritable embarrassment of riches in the college student’s harried life.

Not to mix holiday metaphors, but those instructors who insist on holding classes or pulling nasty tricks like giving pop quizzes on Wednesday are just plain Scrooges. Unless there’s an incredibly good reason to hold class, professors should get into the spirit of the season and let their students begin their celebration just a little bit early. Those who have already done so get a resounding pass, and maybe even a slice or two of pumpkin pie from grateful students next Monday.

Fail

Lovers of language, please refudiate

Last week, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “”refudiate”” its 2010 Word of the Year. The mash-up of refute and repudiate was coined by Sarah Palin in a tweet in July. Palin, in response to the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York, wrote, “”Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.””

There are innumerable things wrong with the tweet, ideologically as well as linguistically (pls? Are you a seventh grader with a new cell phone?).

And now the dictionary itself, which should be the last bastion against this kind of sad misuse of language, has chosen to actually reward Palin for her garbled nonsense. On the Oxford University Press blog, an editor defended the choice, writing “”From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used ‘refudiate,’ we have concluded that neither ‘refute’ nor ‘repudiate’ seems consistently precise, and that ‘refudiate’ more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of ‘reject.'”” That’s an incredibly generous interpretation of what was probably just a misspelling gone viral.

For legitimizing the word, and for adding to Palin’s already overly large ego — she compared her use of “”refudiate”” to Shakespeare’s penchant for inventive language in another tweet — the New Oxford American Dictionary gets a fail.

— Editorials are determined by the Daily Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Heather Price-Wright, Luke Money, Colin Darland and Steven Kwan. They can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.