1. “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” is racist. The nursery rhyme, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is under attack. Some schools and family centers in Scotland, England, and Australia have eliminated the word “black” as racist, and now refer to “rainbow sheep,” “happy sheep,” or “green sheep,” though these new adjectives make no sense at all. Stuart Chamberlain of the Oxford Sure Start Center in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, said, “Basically we have taken the equal-opportunity approach to everything we do.” A local dissenter, however, called it “Stalinist.”

2. M.A.s may be racist, postmasters too. Stephen Davis, master of Pierson College at Yale, says the word “master” in his title is severely upsetting some students and driving them off campus. He wants Pierson and Yale’s eleven other residential colleges to have “heads” rather than “masters.”