Halls of ivy

[James E. Clapp]

Fred Shapiro wrote:
>
> I don't have an answer yet, but I find this question amusing since it is
> so emblematic of popular attitudes toward etymology.  Sort of the opposite
> of Occam's Razor, as an extremely far-fetched explanation is advanced
> while the obvious and undoubtedly truthful explanation is prefaced with
> "Surely it is not simply from..."

Yes.  How do people come up with these things?  And why do others give them
credence?  I think the phenomenon is related to general popular paranoia:
The obvious explanation for something must be a cover-up for a much more
complicated (and usually sinister) truth, and the more self-evident the
explanation the more devious and dangerous the plotters are.

Examples from Roswell, New Mexico, etc., etc., abound; but this general way
of thinking was nicely illustrated for me when I was clerking for a federal
judge and we were assigned one of those cases filed periodically by
completely wacky people.  This one (not atypically) was a suit against every
public official from the head of the FBI to the county dog-catcher (I'm
taking a little literary license, but you get the point), alleging a massive
conspiracy against the plaintiff.  The neat part was that the plaintiff had
hard evidence:  Con Edison, he said, had kept the street in front of his
apartment building dug up for months, a fact for which there obviously could
be no reasonable explanation except that it provided cover for them so that
they could hide behind their trucks and spy on him.  To anyone who has ever
lived in New York, this guy is not nuts; he's brilliant!

Anyway, isn't "ivied halls" used as a synonym for "halls of ivy"?  Probably
has something to do with inserting intravenous tubing...

James E. Clapp