[Ads-l] Barry Popik?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

I'm not sure what's so unusual about this. There are different forms of requests, but whether it came from Barry directly or was generated automatically by LinkedIn, why wouldn't you assume that this is accurate?

I am a first-degree connection with Barry on LinkedIn (a site that I find almost totally useless, for what it's worth), and his identifying info on the site is exactly what's being reported here--RPI degrees, JD from Truro, lives in Goshen--and what I know to be true because I know him. The picture is a picture of Barry. If the Barry-like person contacting you is also friends with me (and other language types like Ben Zimmer), you should be extremely sure that it's really our Barry. Whether you want to connect with him there is a separate thing, of course.

Jesse Sheidlower

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:24:23PM -0400, Wilson Gray wrote:
> > I doubt that he
> > initiated the Linked-in message Jim Landau received.
> 
> I've fallen for that one, myself. I was suckered into joining Facebook by
> an invite supposedly from someone else who went to MIT, subsequently
> becoming famous in the field, as this writer, sadly, has not. I'm still
> cringing.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 8:56 PM Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at mst.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> > The main news about Barry Popik is that he is continuing
> > work on his extraordinary blog about words and expressions (barrypopik.com
> > ).
> > Barry was trained as an attorney ( don't know at which university), but
> > Wikipedia mentions only his work on
> > etymology:
> > 'Barry Popik (born 1961) is an American etymologist.
> > Popik is a consulting editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia
> > of Food and Drink in America and was described in The Wall Street Journal
> > as "the restless genius of American etymology".'
> > Btw, he does live in Goshen, NY, and I doubt that he
> > initiated the Linked-in message Jim Landau received.
> >
> > Gerald Cohen
> > (who has co-authored several books with
> > Barry)
> > bcc: Barry Popik
> >
> > ________________________________
> > From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> > James Landau, jjjrlandau at NETSCAPE.COM
> > Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2021 7:00 PM
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Subject: Barry Popik?
> >
> > I thought Barry Popik was living in Arizona, but I just got a mysterious
> > LinkedIn connection request from "Barry Popik, BS Rensselaer Polytechnic,
> > Doctor of Law Touro College". According to the LinkedIn request,
> > Dr. Popik is living in Goshen, Orange County, New York.
> > If this is our old ADS-L colleague, then the BS from Renssalaer implies
> > a technical degree. Perhaps in nuclear physics, which could use an
> > etymologist before it gets totally swamped by terminology like "quark",
> > "muon", "Higgs boson", "collapse of the wave function", and "dark energy".
> >
> > James Landau
> > jjjrlandau at netscape.com
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> 
> -- 
> - Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
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