OT: "Shyster" in today's NY SUN

Bapopik at AOL.COM Bapopik at AOL.COM
Tue May 11 16:40:19 UTC 2004


SHYSTER:
   I've written to the NEW YORK SUN many times with error corrections, but no correction was ever made to anything.  It was said that "jazz" was common slang from before the CIvil War.  No correction.  Quotations wrongly attributed to Mark Twain and Stalin were never corrected.  My name and work have never appeared in the SUN, and Gerald Cohen beat me to it!
   11 May 2004, NEW YORK SUN, PAST & PRESENT "The Subterranenan Democrat" by William Bryk, pg. 15, col. 2:

   Nonetheless, according to research by the New York Historical Society's Roger Mahovich and the University of Missouri's Professor Gerald L. COhen, the short-lived paper made a (sic) enduring addition to our language on July 29, 1843, when a Mike Walsh interview (Col. 3--ed.) used "shyster" to describe a dishonest lawyer.  Underworld cant for a worthless fellow, the word was apparently derived from German excremental slang.

BACK TO WORK:
   I was chatting with an NYU Bobst librarian last night about George Thompson, the Bobst and other matters.  She had also spotted the Saturday article about my job.  Yes, the salary figure per hour was not a misprint.  We earn less per hour than the lowest-priced parking ticket ($35, although many tickets are $165 a pop), with no benefits and no employee protections and miserable working conditions.
   First-day paralegals make more.  And this is not some place in the boonies--this is NYC.  And that's after a recent salary increase, too.
   Does John Baker know of any lawyer with fifteen years' experience who makes below $35 an hour?  Any paralegal?
   Back to work because my plane didn't crash...



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