"pig" as policeman

[Jonathan Lighter]

No, Larry. The 20th C. began when the _Titanic_ struck the iceberg in 1912. Or with Special Relativity in 1905.  Of course, Poincare' came very close to Einstein's theory in 1900, so perhaps we should say it began then.

  If the assassination marked the beginning of the sixties, they got off to a bum start and rarely rose much higher.  While we were letting our hair grow, eggheads were inventing MIRVs.  No contest.

  BTW, I still think of the Beatles as only semi-talented. (Which puts them above most fifties rockers.)

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "pig" as policeman
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At 4:48 PM -0700 8/9/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I didn't mean to suggest the '50's were so great either.
>
> The Bill of Rights business seems to be endemic: Gallup or Harris
>discovered during the Nixon administration that a significant
>portion of the electorate favored the repeal of many of the
>amendments.
>
> The biggest relief I can think of was surviving the Missile
>Crisis. When Treasury Secretary Dillon was summoned back from
>overseas for urgent consultations (think about *that* for a moment),
>he told the press "We may be in a nuclear war by the end of the
>week."
>
Yes, but that was '62. The sixties began in '63 when Kennedy was
assassinated, or maybe it was the Beatles, or when we let our hair
grow. And they ended in the summer of '74 when Nixon resigned. (Nor
is this unprecedented; after all, the 20th century began in 1914 with
the outbreak of WWI and, I suppose, ended at dawn 9/11/01.)

LH

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