Safire Watch (continued)

Sat Jan 20 20:27:19 UTC 2001

   A few days ago, I again suggested to people on this list a way to end this.
   E-mail Elizabeth Phillips at phille at nytimes.com.  Ask her to join the ADS and ANS for free.  Ask her to correct my words.  Tell me if you get a response (that I've never gotten).
   Did anyone do that?  What would it take, a mouse click?  How difficult is that????
   Whatever.  The fact is, I still have no response.  My work has been incorrect for over four months now.
   Again, if you want to stop this (as I want to), please do this.  My profession work has been murdered and I feel pretty bad about that.
   This past week, I told the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guaridan, and the San Francisco Examiner about Peter Tamony's work on "jazz."  Tamony was an ADS member for over 50 years.  Now, a person in Safire's position can just call up Ken Burns, ask if he's ever heard of Peter Tamony, ask why the "jazz" work isn't correct, and then rake Burns over the coals in his column.  But I've got to defend Peter Tamony without any help.  Thanks a bunch.
   Which brings us, again, to this week's "On Language" column.  It's another winner.
   You can look up "titular" in the dictionary.  Safire gets a column out of it.
   Elizabeth Phillips is mentioned and given credit for finding the first "shrinking violet" in SYLVIA (1827) by Geroge Darley.  Nice job.
   Then I checked Literature Online.  The first citation is SYLIVA (1827) by George Darley.
   There's a little line at the bottom of Literature Online, and it reads like this:

   Don't these things apply to William Safire's columns?