anyone for an anecdote fact-check? (yeah, yeah)

[Tom Kysilko]

Quoting Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>:
> >On Mon, 27 Dec 2004, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> >>  On the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup, Mark Webb found a citation of the
> >>  Morgenbesser anecdote from 1977 (NYT Magazine):
> >
> >I don't find anything pre-1977 on JSTOR, Questia, Nexis or ProQuest
> >Historical Newspapers.
> >Fred Shapiro
> >
> hmmm.  seems suspicious to me, although maybe it's not the kind of
> thing that would have made the papers even if it actually happened.
> larry

When I heard this story during my days as a philosophy grad student (1975-80ish)
it never had more dignity than grad student scuttlebutt and had no names
attached to it that I can recall.  My best recollection is that the perpetrator
was some unnamed bigwig in American philosophy of language and that the victim
was some hapless junior faculty trying to make a name for him/herself.  The
story was certainly not repeated during the course on J L Austin I took
sometime during my second or third year.
--Tom Kysilko