“-I do not think it means what you think it means.”
– The Princess Bride, 1987

The word of the day, class, is “profiling.”

A member of the media came to the office the other day in a rage because his daughter had been given a parking ticket.  Apparently she was using his press/media pass to park wherever she wanted, which is all sorts of against the rules.  We tend to frown upon people claiming privileges that don’t belong to them, see yesterday’s post on decency.  But he came in all aflame with righteous indignation…and spoiled it all by lying and saying he was the one who had received the ticket and how dare we ticket him, and he would go to the administration with this –

Red cut him off by telling him that his daughter had already come in and admitted to misusing the pass, which took him aback, but he recovered swiftly and threw out an accusation.
“So, you’re ticketing my daughter for using my pass?  That’s profiling!”

Cut to yesterday in J.’s class, scene: a discussion of hiring and management.  A young man for some reason failed to grasp the problem in a case study of a manager refusing to hire a qualified applicant because he didn’t feel that “a timid Asian woman” would be able to handle the rigors of the job.  (Ah, shades of the Annual Anti-Harassment Seminar…)  J. pulled his jaw off the floor and tried to explain the many, many errors of this man’s thinking but to no avail.  His classmate came back with, “So a woman should automatically be hired even if she can’t do the job?  That’s profiling!”

Acquaint yourself with a dictionary.