My Impromptus today is chockfull of items, but I’m going to sneak another one into this post. (Maybe two.) In that column today, I write about our military and “Thank you for your service.” (This topic was prompted by Fleet Week, here in New York City, where National Review is headquartered.) I write about Nikki Haley and the Republican Party. I write about Americanism and nativism.

I also have an item on the N-word, which I consider the ugliest, nastiest word in the American tongue. My item includes the question, “Is ‘N-word’ a legitimate or desirable phrase? Is it better to say or write the word straight out?”

Anyway, this column has a lot of food for thought, to swallow or choke on. Go here.

Let’s have a little mail. A reader — an old friend and colleague — writes,

I spent a year in a military unit in Kandahar and a year in southern Iraq working in a mixed unit . . .

There is a gulf of incomprehension that divides active-duty military from civilians. In Iraq, where I was embedded with an Army unit, most of the mil folks did not live in fear of death or injury. Sure, they carried guns, but their lives were fairly ordinary, mundane even. Right up the road there was a Special Forces unit that went out every night and took regular casualties.

Civilians understandably do not grasp the difference — how could they? — and they accordingly shower supply clerks with accolades the clerks know to be undeserved.

And yet, says my friend, “Thank you for your service” can hardly be wrong. In a 2017 podcast with Ash Carter, the former secretary of defense, I brought up this issue. He answered thoughtfully. He began with, “If you mean it, you should say it.”

Maybe one more, on this subject:

Hi, Jay,

“Thank you for your service” — to me, it always seems to be about the delivery. There are an awful lot of people who will say it to me as an afterthought, sort of because they feel they should, in order to avoid the stigma of being like the people in the ’70s who spat at returning servicemen. . . .

In contrast, the people who really are thankful make you feel that way without using the phrase. I think the most wonderful way they do it is by asking you exactly what you did. Not action, but what was your specialty, etc. . . .

At any rate, I long ago made peace with the phrase and, for the most part, it flows over me, but your writing made me recall my thoughts about it when the phrase first started to be heard in 2000 or so, about the time this sailor got out.

Let’s have a final note, on a different subject:

Jay,

I sometimes think we give the N-word way too much power. . . . But then, I am rarely called a “kike” anymore . . . J. D. Salinger wrote a short story about a boy being confronted with the term. I don’t remember the title of it.

“Down at the Dinghy,” 1949.

I said I would sneak in another item — and it concerns something that came over the wires this morning. An AP report begins,

The nearly $2.8 billion settlement that has been approved by the NCAA and the nation’s five largest conferences is a historic step toward a more professional model for college sports.

I am in a radical mood. I say, the hell with it. End the charade of the “student-athlete” (although I know such students, and athletes, exist). Make sports straightforwardly professional, as in baseball’s minor leagues. Let college be college again. If students want to play sports, on the side, let them do so in clubs — the way there are theater clubs and student orchestras and all the rest of it. We had a term: “extracurricular activities.”

“Let’s call the whole thing off,” wrote Ira Gershwin. Divorce college from professional sports. Bring back Dink Stover.

(I should tell you, however, that you’re talking to someone so old-fashioned — such a dinosaur — that he still thinks the Olympics should be amateur.)

Maybe I can end with something amusing. One of David Pryce-Jones’s books is about France and the Middle East (Betrayal). The cover of one of its editions shows Charles de Gaulle with David Ben-Gurion. The difference in height is striking. I thought of this photo when looking at a photo in this news report: of the U.S. treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and the Italian foreign minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti. Fantastic. Like me and Kareem.

Later on.