From a reader in a fine American city whose name is an anagram of

MINNEAPOSIL:

“Derb–I just read the Corner, and J-Pod’s post about you in effect being

Eeyore. I always envisioned you more as Rabbit than Eeyore – not so much

depressed as just focused on tasks at hand. So I thought to myself, ‘well I

guess I’m Tigger. Or a cross between Pooh and Tigger. And that’s fine with

me.’ I never thought I would write it. (Our two girls are 5½ and 3½, giving

me license to be up on all of this.)

“However, since you’re into paranoid pessimism, how far in the future do you

think ‘Tigger’ will be allowed as the name of a character for children? I’m

amazed it hasn’t happened already, but does no one else envision a day when

the ACLU takes the works of AA Milne to task for introducing the name of a

character that sounds ‘too close’ to that of a racial slur?”

[Derb here] The awful thing, Sir, is that it doesn’t actually take the ACLU

to suppress things like that. We do it ourselves, with our pathologically

hypertrophied “sensitivity.” PC has seeped so deep into our bones that we

are now self-policing. Like the British journalist in the old rhyme:

No one could ever bribe or twist –

Thank God! — the British journalist;

But seeing what the man will do

Un-bribed, there’s no good reason to.

I predict that Tigger will be unmentionable in 2-5 years.

(And no snarky comments about various other predictions of mine, please.)