Libercon

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:57 PM -0400 8/31/04, Kara Everman wrote:
>Dear Doctor Irons,
>     After seperating the morphemes of "Liber" and "Con" I came up with the
>possibility that libercon may have lexical properties from "liberal" and
>"conservative." A libercon may be someone of the political
>persuasion in which has
>properties of both liberalism and conservatism. A "neocon" may be referring to
>neo- conservatism. I would suggest that a "libercon" is a reformed
>neo-conservative.
>    Sincerely,
>Kara Everman

In principle, yes.  In actuality, as we pointed out a few hours ago,
in this context Bill Safire calls himself a "libercon" to indicate
that he's a libertarian conservative.  As it happens, he's not at all
a liberal.  The meaning of coinages, here and elsewhere, is largely
determined by the context of use and intentions of the user, not by
what is a logical possibility, although the latter might be a good
starting point if we have nothing else to go on, which isn't the case
here.  (Of course the root of "liberal" is identical to that of
"libertarian", but the two political philosophies are entirely
distinct, as Safire would be the first to point out.)

Larry