Fun

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

As Mark clarified, the piece is satire - sorry I didn't make that clear.

I thought the notion of Safire eating in fast food joints - let alone having 2 big beef burritos - would be absurd enough to make the satire clear. Still, it's interesting that the piece so accurately captured our sense of Safire's pendantry that some took it as real. 

-----Original Message-----
From:   Beverly Flanigan [mailto:flanigan at OHIOU.EDU]
Sent:   Sat 8/3/2002 12:13 PM
To:     ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Cc:	
Subject:             Re: Fun

But of course the back-to-back sibilants in Burritos Supreme would probably
not be heard as pluralizing the noun, so Safire might have been heard as
"talking funny,"  i.e., not marking the plural after a quantifier (ESL
speakers do this all the time).  In any case, it's rather pedantic to fuss
over which word to pluralize in informal food term usage, as I'm sure Matt
would agree.  "Patronized" indeed--but I suppose it made great press.

At 04:59 PM 8/2/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> From _The Onion_ (reprised on my calendar for last month):
>
>William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior
>
>NEW YORK - Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, _New York
>Times_ 'On Language' columnist William Safire ordered two "Whoppers
>Junior" Thursday. "Most Burger King patrons operate under the fallacious
>assumption that the plural is 'Whopper Juniors,'" Safire told a woman
>standing in line behind him. "This, of course, is a grievous grammatical
>blunder, akin to saying 'passerbys' or, worse yet, the dreaded 'attorney
>generals.'" Last week, Safire patronized a midtown Taco Bell, ordering
>"two Big Beef Burritos Supreme."