When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?
When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?
For example, in Washington Heights and Golan Heights, what does "heights" mean? What does it tell us about the place?
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Here's a fun one. I live in a city called Terre Haute. It means "high ground." It's in a river valley.
Terre Haute has federal death row, Rose-Hulman, and Square Donuts. Am I missing anything?
Indiana State University and St. Mary-of-the-Woods University are also here. There's also a fun pet store which is basically a zoo because of all the animals they have that are for looking at, not buying, called Atlantis. There's also a video arcade bar and an all-ages pinball arcade which offers $10 all-play on Friday and Saturday nights.
Overall, I don't like Terre Haute, but it has its pluses.
On the other hand, they're building a casino. Thankfully not on the side of town where I live.
There's also a new concert arena. They recently hosted Ted Nugent. So I won't be paying to go to concerts there.
Fair enough - I spent a few weeks there for work. People were friendly.
There are definitely friendly people here, but there are also a lot of major assholes. It's a very mixed town. It used to be a bellwether when it came to who won the presidential election every election year, but we got it wrong with Biden. There are a lot of union halls here and a lot of houses have 'union strong' signs in front of them, but it's Indiana, so there are also a lot of Trump supporters. There are also major meth and homeless problems here. My wife is an administrator at the public library. She sees some really weird and often very unfortunate things. A couple of years ago, we went to a store to buy a tent for a high school girl who was sharing a tent with her alcoholic father in the woods and walking to high school every day and then to the library to do her homework while her father sat outside and got drunk. That was all we could do for her, but she's not the only child living in that sort of level of poverty here.
The school system is also awful. We pulled my daughter out of it a couple of weeks ago due to excessive bullying that the administration did basically nothing about despite our pleas. A couple of years ago, in fifth grade, she had a substitute teacher- for the entire year. She was awful too, and told kids shit like the election was stolen rather than actually teach them things. In fourth grade, the school system offered online school due to COVID but didn't prepare anything, so it was just up to the online teachers to come up with a curriculum and it didn't work. Her education has suffered so badly. Thankfully, there's a state-based online school which is being done by Pierson, the textbook company, so we're relatively assured that she'll finally get a decent education.
Seems a lot of folks, including that teacher, would argue Terre Haute didn't get Biden's election wrong, they got Trump's election right!
Sadly, they'd rather be Right than correct.
Hope she does get a better education but here's a mandatory fuck pearsons. They're a big part of the reason why college education is so fricking expensive.
Yeah, I know. Pearson sucks. But the online program she's in now sucks more. It's run by the county school system and the educational package they picked was the cheapest one possible. Her English lessons are ridiculous because they're based entirely on public domain texts. She's in 7th grade and they have had her read things like a letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison and an O. Henry story about a safecracker. The language is so archaic that she can't parse it, and the context is so alien that she has no frame of reference. Basically, I have to go through these texts with her line by line and explain to her what each line means. And the English teacher they have assigned to this who you can meet with if you have problems basically told me yes, that's what I will have to do.
At least the Pearson program will have texts appropriate for a kid her age.
This is from the Jefferson letter. I can barely understand it and I've taken college English classes.
First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land & not by the law of Nations. To say, as Mr. Wilson does, that a bill of rights was not necessary because all is reserved in the case of the general government which is not given, while in the particular ones all is given which is not reserved, might do for the Audience to whom it was addressed, but is surely a gratis dictum, opposed by strong inferences from the body of the instrument, as well as from the omission of the clause of our present confederation which had declared that in express terms.
That paragraph has two Latin phrases. I didn't even know what gratis dictum meant. I had to look it up.