politically sensitive labels

[Fred Shapiro]

> >associate themselves with "Conservative" and "Liberal". These can
> >indeed be studied as factual matters, as Fred Shapiro notes of "civil
> >liberties": a term which looks as if it has been picked up and given
> >a new direction by a particular part of the political spectrum.
> >
> >Roly Sussex

I didn't say that "civil liberties" had been given a new direction by the
Bush Administration, just that the Administration's activities had given
it a renewed prominence.  A previous poster had asserted, in my view quite
inaccurately, that the term was invariably linked with the ACLU.  An
example of a group other than the ACLU that is closely linked to "civil
liberties" nowadays is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  A Google
search for "civil liberties" in conjunction with "Electronic Frontier
Foundation" pulls up 40,000 hits.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
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