Pub Note: Here are results of the Law-Enforcement Nomenclature Survey posted with Ted Leonhardt’s column July 8. Jessica Knapp, PhD, a founding member of Overture, freelance writer and instructor in strategic communication at Seattle University, wrote and conducted the survey about the words we use to refer to law enforcement and the way we feel about those words. Ted’s latest column—Things Have Changed!—follows the graphic.
Ted Says . . . Things Have Changed!
By Ted Leonhardt
A hoodie, a mask and a cardboard sign. A tired look that goes with spending the day begging.
“Will work for food” is the way it is in Seattle these days.
My parents came of age in the ’30s. The Great Depression was their world. They came to Seattle in the late ’30s and rented a Ballard apartment. Dad always was a hard worker; he’d dropped out of school in his teens to work. When he and mom arrived in Seattle, he got a job sanding cars for 25 cents an hour. It was enough to get by on until he got a better job assembling stoves at Sears. That job paid well enough to buy a tiny one-bedroom house on Beacon Hill.
They were lucky. There were more than a thousand men living in south Seattle’s Hooverville at the time. [Yes, they all were men; women and children were not allowed. Seattle Police enforced that policy, which was part of the moral code at the time. Civilized society is a strange thing.]
After serving in the war, dad got his Sears job back, working there until retirement during what we now know was the biggest expansion of the middle class in history. Dad wrapped packages for most of his career at Sears. Yet our house was paid off, and we had a new car every few years. He died in his seventies, but my mother lived into her mid-nineties, supported financially all those years by the Sears retirement program.
Another irony: The Sears catalog was discontinued in 1993. Amazon was founded the following year. Amazon went on to become the place you could find anything you wanted, just as Sears had been for a hundred years.
But Amazon is not a place where a package-wrapper will be able to own a home, have a new car every few years and help a child through college in a single-income family.
Things have changed.
Note from Ted: Thanks to all who took our overture.coop survey on law enforcement nomenclature, whose results are shown below. My consulting practice is described on my site at tedleonhardt.com. You can reach me at: ted@tedleonhardt.com