OED News (June); 'Tis pity, but "Shakespeare" is Ford

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

OED NEWS

   The June 2002 OED News (www.oed.com) is out.  The OED has revised terms
such as "Mitzvah."  It's a blessing to us all.

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"TIS PITY, BUT "SHAKESPEARE" IS FORD

   The great literary sleuth Don Foster was wrong.  A poem he attributed to
Shakespeare is now conceded to have been written by John Ford ('TIS PITY
SHE'S A WHORE).  His "computer literary analysis" was flawed.
   I once e-mailed Foster about David Shulman's finding that CRIES OF NEW
YORK was possibly authored by Washingtopn Irving, but the great man Foster
couldn't e-mail back.
   This thing got huge space in today's NEW YORK TIMES--not because of the
work of other scholars, but because Foster changed his mind.  In fact, the
TIMES couldn't even get the other scholars' names down correctly:

   Professor Vickers, the director of Renaissance studies at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, credits Richard Kennedy, an
independent researcher and author of children's books, as the first to
identify Ford as the author of the poem, in a controversy that raged on
Shakesper for two years after the Foster theory was announced.
   "I was the first one who ever laid onto Ford," Mr. Richards said in a
telephone interview Monday. (...)
   "I thought: Why not Ford?  Let's take a look," Mr. Kennedy continued.

(If the TIMES ever does do a story on "the Big Apple," perhaps I can be "Mr.
Barry" as well as "Mr. Popick"?--ed.)