As I read the Daily on Feb. 27, I noticed many people had been offended by a few “Just Sayin” comments. Those comments were: “Just had a staring contest with a squintey. They are fearless” and “I just saw a squintey inside a building. … They have started the invasion.”

Despite the fact these statements are nonsensical if one takes “squintey” as a term for a person, and that “squintey” is not a common American racial slur, many students and professors took offense, believing the word to be a racial slur against people of southeast Asian descent denoting the shape of their eyes.

Sorry to burst your self-righteous bubbles, but “squintey” — pronounced sometimes as “squinny” due to the Midwestern tendency to drop Ts — is the nickname of the chipmunks that we see all over campus. Reread those comments using the correct definition of “squintey” and those comments immediately make more sense.

I don’t believe the responsibility for this mistake belongs to the self-righteous and over-zealous students and professors who misunderstood a few people’s comments and were quick to conflate them with general student opinion. Certainly those people exhibited undesirable behavior when they quickly jumped to the conclusion they were being attacked, even though the “attacks” made no sense. This doesn’t constitute responsibility, though.

The blame instead lies squarely with the Daily, a publication that time and time again has failed at its responsibilities of understanding the community, as well as the responsibility of doing even cursory proofreading. Someone somewhere at the Daily should have been able to say “Wait a minute, you guys have this all wrong!” but instead, everyone there was either too lazy or too uninformed to stop this incident before it became the debacle that it now is.