Safire

[Lynne Murphy]

I wasn't going to get into this but...since it goes on and on...
Barry complains that this or the other person is a genius or a great
scholar according to Safire, but he is no one.  Speaking as someone
who is also no one to William Safire, I have to say that this is not
a bad thing to be.  (I'm also no one to Jesse Jackson and the NAACP,
even though I've published about his "coinage" of 'African American'
a bit.)  It seems far more important to be someone to the dictionary
editors (who obviously adore Barry) and to the scholars on this list.
Safire's adored by armchair prescriptivists.  He's a popularizer not
a scholar, and the stuff he writes is not the stuff that will
determine the place of the "big apple" in the annals of etymology.

Lynne, who's getting out of it again

--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320