This is the fourth or fifth one I’ve read about today. The kids are effecting change. I love it.
Thank you for spelling effecting correctly.
Isn’t effect a noun, affect a verb? Am I supposed to discern which in other ways?
To “affect” a change would be to alter the change itself, for example if the university had already been reviewing its portfolio then the protesters might be affecting the change by making it happen more quickly.
To “effect” a change would be to cause the change in the first place.
This is one of the few oddities of the English language that I struggle with constantly. It seems like, as a native speaker, most of the other ones just “feel” or “sound” right, but I haven’t been able to nail that down with effect/affect for some reason
The trouble is that both words have a verb sense and a noun sense.
The noun sense of affect is something like “mood” or “emotion” and isn’t used often, while the noun sense of effect is “thing that happened (because of some cause)” and is a rather common word.
The verb sense of affect is “to cause something to happen (to something)” and is a pretty common word, while the verb sense of effect is more like “to make something be true” as in “effecting change” above.
The mnemonic I use is from dungeons and dragons, some spells are “mind-affecting effects” meaning they change minds and they’re caused by the spell being cast.
If I use my Persuasion skill to help someone think their way through a problem, is that a “mind-effecting affect”?
Ok listen, I’m all in favor of Israel knocking it the f*ck off and students protesting, but this article is written with a very specific skew.
Last week, Columbia University summoned an army of heavily armed, riot gear-clad police officers to attack its own students for peacefully protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and the university’s financial ties to Israel.
Couple of notes here.
- It has evolved to a non peaceful protest. Some neo-nazi assholes were physically engaging with Jewish students. That’s not cool.
- A good number of nom-students showed up and we’re the ones causing the problems.
- Columbia called the local police to disperse a situation that was getting unsafe fast, because a university isn’t really qualified to do that. Which is the right call IMO. It’s the NYPD that choose riot gear.
Should it have been handled differently? Yes. Was the school dumb? Yes. We really don’t need this slanted BS news to see that.
This is some of the quotes from a Newsweek article:
One video posted on X, formerly Twitter, showed a masked protester outside the university’s gates appearing to chant: “Go back to Poland!”
Another video showed a man telling Jewish students outside the campus gates that “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you.”
Devolved into non peaceful protests?
You got a source there, buddy?
I live nearby, I walked by.
I think (I don’t know for sure) that the students were peaceful, it looks like it got co-opted by a few loud neo-nazis who were being assholes.
My thing is the original article was pretty off.
Then maybe arrest the Nazis instead of beating the actual protesters and shutting down the protest? Interesting that the absolute thinnest veil of an excuse is enough for you to be ok with police brutalizing innocent people who just happen to be exercising their right to protest.
