QOTY candidate, or new wine in old bottles?

[Dan Goncharoff]

All?

http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/raskin.asp

DanG


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      QOTY candidate, or new wine in old bottles?
>
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>
> In reading a HuffPo piece at
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/brian-sims-abortion-pennsylvania_n_3141950.html
> ,
> I was struck by the phrasing of the last two lines of Bryan Sims's
> statement:
>
> "This legislation is about advancing an ideology of oppression and
> suppression, even if such a plan means ignoring the oath of office that
>  each of us swore," Sims told his colleagues during a floor debate in the
> House of Representatives. "As a reminder, Mr. Speaker, I do believe this
> has been forgotten entirely by many of my colleagues today: Each of us put
> our hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. We did not
> place our hands on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."
>
> This strikes me as too eloquent for our times, as if it might have come
> from the Darrow/Scopes era, but the google hits I see all come back to
> Bryan Sims.  Could it actually have been uttered for the first time by Sims
> in this speech?  Might it be a variant of some earlier   rhetorical
> reversal with different content?
>
> LH
>
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