Well, on Wednesday, November 13, 1996, I recieved a letter from Mr. Andrew Lee [feel free to write to him] regarding the "Wanker Homepage", which our hall had made to represent ourselves on the 'net. I mean, how many other dormitory (oh...i mean "Residence Hall") halls have their own web pages. We were pretty proud of this. Then, this Australian dick comes along and writes this letter:
"As usual the Amercians have no idea about anything outside their insulated world. Try finding out the definition of wanker and you will have a good idea what you are."
I was pretty upset about this, so I sent a response back (an appropriate one, I hope):
Subject: Re: Wanker Homepage
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 00:16:14 -0500
From: Ryan Miller <ryantm@umich.edu>
To: Andrew Lee <ajlee@henry.katel.net.au>
Mr. Lee, Thank you very much for your insightful response to the "Wanker Homepage". In explanation to our using of the name "Wanker", I have a couple short stories to tell you. First of all, the members of "Wanker Hall" are all students at the University of Michigan, one of the most highly respected state universities in the country, if not the world. Most of us are first-year students here. The first reason for the name stems from an incident a few months ago. One of us had a friend of ours buy him a six pack of "Wanker Beer", a little know of brand of beer here in the US. The labels on these bottles picture beautiful women. We all thought that this was fairly comical, so this along with a second incident led to our name. Our collective involvement in this incident in the first week we lived here when we first met really brought us together as a group, and was a real bonding experience.
The second incident deals with our residency status. We all live together on the same floor of the same residence hall (dormitory). This particular hall happens to be the only all-male hall in this building (which houses almost 1500 students). None of us chose to be placed in this hall, so we were a little dismayed at not being able to live closer to the opposite sex. The way the name ties into this is that "wanker" refers, in the US at least, to one who masturbates. We didn't choose this name for this reason, but some of our friends who live in other halls suggested it as a way for us to poke fun at our unintentional residency placement.
Because of these reasons, we chose the name "Wanker Hall" as our hall name, which gave us more of an identity as a group. We are aware of the meanings of this word outside of our "insulated world", as you put it. We are not ignorant people, Mr. Lee (in fact, 20% of our hall is in the University Honors program; campus-wide only 5% are in the Program). We are aware of the uses of this word in other places in the world. Overall, though, this name has given us more of a community friendship feeling, which, in turn, has provided for a smoother transition to the difficult world of college life. Next time, I hope you will not pass judgment on people because of your own lack of prior knowledge, or because of your limited knowledge of world contextualizations of certain words. I also hope that you will not pass judgment on an entire country of people, which I think is absurdly inappropriate for anyone to do. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to communicate with me in any way (e-mail, telephone, or postal mail).
Sincerely, Ryan Miller ("The Other Ryan"; "Circus Boy"), and the residents of Wanker Hall.
So, if you write to us with kind comments: Thank you. If you are going to write to us with comments about how our name is inappopriate, please kindly go away, with no harm done to either of us (you know we'd win anyway).
