{"id":7556,"date":"2016-06-10T10:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=7556"},"modified":"2023-07-11T23:01:36","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T04:01:36","slug":"worst-names-iowa-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2016\/06\/worst-names-iowa-list\/","title":{"rendered":"The “worst names in Iowa” list"},"content":{"rendered":"

(alternate title: “I am a scientist. I arrange, design, and sell science.”)<\/em><\/p>\n

Without a doubt, the “Iowa State University College of Human Sciences” is the most ridiculous name thought up in Iowa in the 21st century. Created in 2005 through the merger of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences (which, if you’re old enough, was Home Economics) and College of Education, it has nothing to do with the hard sciences and very little to do with the soft sciences \u2014 that’s what the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is for. The Department of\u00a0Human Development and Family Studies<\/a>\u00a0is about as close as it gets.<\/p>\n

And now, it’s brought us this sentence, courtesy of an e-mail from the Alliance for Iowa State: “Pamela White’s four decades of service at Iowa State have helped the world to define what it means to be a human scientist.” First, if she has, it’s because some focus group came up with it only a decade ago! Second, are we referring to the fact she is a human or that she studies humans? (What about cat scientists<\/a>? Should we contrast with a plant scientist, i.e. one who studies plants, or may be a human-plant hybrid<\/a>?)<\/p>\n

The College of Human Sciences can serve a springboard for a list of the what I think are the other bad names thought up for Iowa entities in the past 15 years. The list starts with the contingent representing Morrison’s Law of Team Names:\u00a0The popularity of a sport’s league is inversely proportional to the number of team names that are not plural nouns.<\/em><\/p>\n