4 Comments

High-level snark!👏🏻👏🏻

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To think, this snark is still 100% relevant today. Sad . . .

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PeQululaRy creative and unique

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Kate Morgan Reade: PQR gives your superior lexicography a lot of opportunity. Patriotism, precedent and reliquary speak very much to me. On precedent, I think of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. I think much of "precedent" could be transferred to "originalism" in the "O" section of your dictionary.

It really, really is spooky that not so many years after the Bill of Rights, Congress (circa 1796) enacted the "Alien and Sedition Act," that has been a source of suppression of civil liberties, for example, under Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer (AG in the Administration of President Woodrow Wilson).

Now the new administration (Ahem!) looks to revive the use of that "precedent" in its war on the women and children among immigrants.

Patriotism . . . Yours is similar to classic lexicography on that word. Wasn't it H.L. Mencken who . . .

H. L. Mencken: He wrote massively on language, a subject I love, but somehow I have never been able to see my way through his work.

One can compare his obituaries: Wm Jennings Bryan versus J. Gresham Machen -- both conservative in their religion, but Mencken eulogized the one (Machen) and lambasted the other quite obscenely (Wm Jennings Bryan).

I am not a real fan of Wm Jennings Bryan, but H.L. Mencken seemed rather vulgar in his assessment of one who, however pompous, had fought for labor.

1896: Thou shalt not crucify labor on a cross of gold (referring to dear coins (gold) versus cheaper (silver).

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