I can’t believe we have so many melon lovers here - are you all sure? Has anyone in this thread actually tried a honeydew?
Check out urban dictionary for melon. Or Austin Powers Goldmember.
@moooop Got it. Who knew? I recall when Acadia was still called Beaver college. I thought it was so funny that they changed their name just because of the derogatory slang associated with “beaver”. I audited a few language classes there, and I always associated the name with the cute fluffy animal with webbed feet. I wonder if the name change helped them.
I love melons!!!
Watermelon, honeydew, Cantaloupe and Casava are all great melons!! I think it is a shame that anyone would criticize melons!
Who knew? I thought everybody knew, ergo the line in Goldmember regarding the satellite. Even in Spanish that’s the slang meaning.
@psycholing Many high school and library computer filters would not allow access to the Beaver College website because of the sexual connotation. Beaver College was founded in Beaver County Pennsylvania, hence the name.
@TomSrOfBoston So going back to (Carnegie) “melons”, aren’t they also associated with an aspect of the female anatomy? I mean, if libraries are going to ban every word that has a potential crude connotation, little will be left as allowable.
@psycholing Filters are not that discerning. Mellon may not be recognized as equivalent to melon.
I think it is time to move past the Mellon/melon discussion.
I grew up in Braintree, my dad worked for the MBTA, and I did my very best never to take the train all the way to Alewife. I dislike Harvard because I drive there 3-4 days per week, during rush hour, to get my son to soccer practice. I don’t need to worry about touring campus because my uber-smart son recently told me he has no intention of working hard enough in high school to get in, though soccer may lower his required AI more than he realizes.
Beaver college was originally in Glenside, PA, part of Montgomery county.
There is a Beaver county, but it is in SW Pa. Beaver college is in SE Pa.
Wait! Beaver is now Acadia? I had no idea! One of my Penn roommates did a semester at the London School of Economics through Beaver College. Who knew!?
It’s Arcadia!
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
And Beavers. We get it. A typical teenager without a fully developed prefrontal cortex is as puerile as Beavis and Butthead. No reason the adults needs to be. Let’s move on.
Thank you. How Mellon even morphed into melon and the connotations about “melons” is beyond me. Not even the same word. One of the stranger digressions I’ve seen in awhile.
Re #2456 and 2457, yes, I am that old. I was a tenured professor whilst Hanna was still in elementary school. When my spouse and I were in Cambridge, MA, “Alewife” was just a fish, and not a station.
So I have seen some changes over time in the colleges that unexpectedly became my least favorite, but then rebounded–or that seemed great, and then seemed less great.
For example, when I flew to look at Caltech in 1974, the smog over LA was so bad that Caltech came off my list (for grad school). Now the air is generally much better. There are a lot of complaints on CC about the environment around Yale, but to me these days, it looks “normal.” The University of Chicago was for many years a “dream” school for me in a sense–just that I did not really know about it when I was in high school. When I was last in Chicago, my cab driver seemed reluctant to take me to the university area. He told me that it would be difficult to get a taxi there for the return trip late at night. I’m not sure whether that was just his way of ensuring a significant tip and a reservation for the return trip ahead of time, but other people at the conference did seem a little nervous about the area.
^Bonus points for the use of “whilst.” 
@QuantMech The area around UChicago is now pretty safe, and has been for a more than a decade. Crime rates for the Hyde Park area are way below average for Chicago, and are at the level of the rest of the wealthy neighborhoods of Chicago. So getting a cab or Lyft there is no more difficult than it would be for any other upper income Chicago neighborhood with little nightlife.
Unless your conference was before 2005, I’m sorry, but your cabbie was using out-of-date info to milk you for a bigger tip. It seems that most of your conference got the same bad info.
MWolf, the conference was June 2018. There were certainly no taxis cruising the area when the conference ended for the day at about 9 pm. I might have tried Lyft or Uber. The advanced grad student from the University of Illinois, Chicago, seemed quite nervous about the area after dark. I’m not really familiar with the area, so I don’t know. The cab driver was doing a pretty good job of feigning nerves, though.
I would never expect to hail a cab on the street in Chicago. Uber and Lyft work fine, though they may take a little longer than they’d take downtown.
The crime rate in Hyde Park was never that different from, say, Lincoln Park, even in the 80s.