“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” 

From Lewis Carroll’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

It is not surprising, in a land often compared to Alice’s Wonderland, that many people here believe with Humpty Dumpty that words can mean just what they choose them to mean. For the antiquarians among the Daily Sun’s readers, I offer the following Retro Dictionary, with a few meanings as they used to be. 

Strike: a job action whereby employees refuse to work and through pickets attempt to inform the public and convince fellow, non-unionized workers to honor their picket lines by not working at or patronizing the business being struck. Not to be confused with students playing hooky or on a bullying ego trip, or restriction by force of entry to a business. 

Civil Disobedience: a strategy for creating awareness of an undesirable situation designed to arouse popular opinion to change it, popularized by Henry David Thoreau (failing to pay taxes which supported slavery) and Mahatma Ghandi. An essential element of civil disobedience is the willing acceptance of any penalty or punishment associated with the illegal act, as part of the strategy of showing sincerity and commitment and dramatizing the alleged injustice of the situation. Not to be confused with sabotage or ordinary criminal behavior. 

Political Prisoner: an individual imprisoned solely for expressing unpopular beliefs, especially those against the current government, in a nonviolent way. Not to be confused with individuals committing (especially violent) crimes in the name of a cause (just or not), especially those who seek to evade punishment (see Civil Disobedience). 

Additions to the Retro Dictionary are welcome. 

They have Republican idols and modus operandi.

Regarding “Pierluisi pushes for gay tolerance” (Nov. 16), I hope Pedro Pierluisi’s talk before the gay community was not another photo op for the Fortuño administration. Now, Pierlusi must tell us actually what he is going to do to promote gay tolerance. Words mean nothing without action.

Though they did not go out of their way to push for gay tolerance for fear of losing the suspected large homophobic vote, I always felt that in their soul, former governors Pedro Rosselló, Sila Calderón and Acevedo Vilá are not homophobes. Could that be because they are more like liberal Democrats and definitely not like right-wing Republicans?

Though my soul has from the very beginning warned me that Luis Fortuño could be intolerant of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender or LGBT people, I voted for him. My friends were furious with me. They asked me: “How could you vote for an Opus Dei homophobe?” I was in denial and wanted to believe that he would push for gay tolerance. Now all my friends are gloating: “We told you so.” Why should any self-respecting LGBT person vote for him? What has he done for LGBT Puerto Ricans? He has delayed and harmed efforts to achieve Human Rights for all Puerto Ricans, including LGBT people?

Am I making the same blunder again? Now I believe Pedro Pierluisi when he says he is for gay tolerance. Maybe, I believe him because he is a Democrat and not a “No” Republican. However, how can he push for gay tolerance with a Opus Dei homophobe Republican as his boss?

I have known Democrat Kenneth McClintock since I arrived on the island. One reason why we became friends is because I grew up in Hyde Park, New York, and I knew Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt as a youngster and as a teenager. I played hookey from study hall to skinny dip in her pond at Val Kyle off Route 9G where she had a hide-a-way from the mansion on Route 9. She and I would have conversations when she visited my school Franklin D. Roosevelt High. Around the age of ten, I met President Roosevelt on three different occasions.

I admired McClintock when he campaigned for Hillary Clinton; and later, for Barack Obama. Sorry, but I feel betrayed when Kenneth McClintock, as Secretary of State, sounds more an more like a Fortuño Republican. He actually riduculed eight protesters as “socialists” when they were demonstrating at a Fortuño photo op honoring the fire fighters. These eight protesters could have been not socialists but fired public employees with lots of seniority. A Democrat would have felt their fears and pain. Another Democrat working for Fortuño called the Puerto Rican media “leftists.” I read the Daily Sun and find it not slanted toward any side, but balanced. Attacking the media as socialists and leftists is what you expect from Republicans like Nixon, Reagan and Bush,  and not from Democrats.

Come to think of it, I cannot figure out how Democrats can honor and work for Fortuño. For me to join Fortuño, I would need to trade my soul! There is a major difference between the modus operandi of the Democrat Party and that of the Republican Party. Today, the only Republican idol that I could worship is Colin Powell. I would not want to be in the same room with most of today’s Republican leadership. Come to think of it. Water and oil do not mix. Neither should a liberal Democrat and a “No” Republican.

Doctors step on us, along with the hospitals and insurers, because it’s next to impossible to make it into and through med school without a rich daddy. So what you get is a demand-driven market. That can only be remedied if making a medical career reasonably achievable is recognized as a public interest.

Problem is, we’re ruled by the wealthy, who got that way by hogging resources for themselves. And in our time, those are not only land, mines, buildings and machines, but knowledge as well, whatever can be made into money. In the lyrics of John Lennon:

UPR students as a group do substandard on graduate-school aptitude tests such as the LSAT or the MCAT. And English is blamed here. That you can’t be expected to do well on a test in your second language competing with first languagers.

And many suppose Puerto Ricans are simply dumber than Americans. Like it’s not for nothing that we’re underdeveloped and they’re the world’s superpower.

All of the above is wrong. As is painfully evident within the UPR system. Unless you haven’t had a look elsewhere and wear insular blinders and therefore assume everything is just as skewerd everywhere, you think like the two ants on Khalil Gibhran’s pomegranate.

How can an undergrad learn enough to compete with the mainlanders when one-third of students’ on-campus time goes to treading the bureaucracy, from the mouse-in-the-labyrinth ordeal just to get the courses to the discomfiting mess for every little thing. And when the learning process itself is set up haphazardly …

Like if you want to get something printed — and that’s the simplest thing, isn’t it? Some libraries require you bring the paper, and none is sold on campus. Others use a card, and you can’t use it at another library, and one machine dispenses it, another puts in the money and a third does the actual printing — invariably, one of them will be out of order. And machines are privatized, so it takes a few days to get them repaired. To photocopy one book at another library isn’t allowed, regardless.

Tests are given on material completed weeks before, scarcity of proctors alleged. During the overlap everybody’s focused on the exam material and after that they’ll all behind.

In Humanities a student is encouraged to learn languages, though only the staples are taught. To know a tongue well enough to be of any use, three or four semesters of it is a must. But a percentage of enrollees are expected to flunk out and when that doesn’t happen the percentage goes out anyway as there isn’t the space. So it’s half-languagers galore. The big boss of the department refused to expand the sections no matter what, said it would be unprofessional to do so.

In Natural Sciences there’s a lab session for every topic. Only they’re set up independently, so one never follows the other and it’s a mess. Labs start and end early in the semester and it’s uphill to grasp the lab if the stuff hasn’t been covered in class and, by the time it is, students have forgotten what was done because they didn’t quite get it then.

The preceeding are just desultory instances, a book could be written. Chaos pervades everything and professors are as frustrated as the students, it’s the bureacrats and their mean obduracy, and the politicians in the background.