If you discuss the combination of the Colleges of Education and Family and Consumer Sciences with the corresponding faculty members, make sure to never use the word “merger.” The planning committee purposely avoids the word, and all communications from the colleges called the move a combination rather than a merger.

Why is that? Well, the word “merger” has very specific connotations. The technical definition of “merger” is the dissolving of two companies into a newly created third entity. This entails a new corporation, with virtually no remnants of the original two companies.

In addition, the word “merger” is only a breath away from “hostile takeover,” a Darwinian business principle where one company takes over another and guts the target company of all its old leadership. This type of showdown between the two colleges almost certainly won’t happen, but “merger” might give off that connotation.

In contrast, a combination is “an alliance of persons or parties for a common purpose; an association.” Rather than a homogenous new entity that has no remnants of the two original parts, a combination is an alliance where the two departments still retain their distinct features.

This is why the current FCS faculty so vehemently prefers “combination.” FCS alumni already have to live with the fact that Iowa’s only FCS college won’t exist anymore. They don’t want to see the traditions of the school become absorbed and obscured into a new school that doesn’t represent their alma mater.

We hope the new combination of the FCS and Education colleges become a combination and not a merger. It’s obvious the staff of these two colleges are striving toward that goal — they renamed the new college “the College of Human Sciences” since it focuses on the shared attributes of the individual schools.

Sure, the new moniker is a bit confusing — since the “Human Science” college neglects several human science disciplines, such as political science, anthropology, etc. — but the spirit of focusing on the common attributes while retaining the distinct features should be commended.

Clumping the two schools together is still an unfortunate situation that nobody wanted, and “combination” sounds like a P.R. ploy to paint a rainbow on a raw sewage plant.

Daily editors originally thought the intentions of avoiding the word “merger” sounded dubious.

But the two departments aren’t dubious, and they realize that the combination is not a glorious new day, but an unfortunate way to save Iowa State $500,000. Nevertheless, we hope both schools can retain the unique characteristics that made them nationally renowned.

If the staff want to be zealous about calling the merger a “combination,” we hope they remain just as zealous in making their semantics a reality.