William Safire "Under the Bus"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 11/18/06, Bapopik at aol.com <Bapopik at aol.com> wrote:
>
> For those "under the bus" fans, see William Safire's Sunday NYT column. No
> mention of ADS and our recent thread.

Also, in his treatment of "netroots", no mention of this Jan. '05
post, though he does (inaccurately) crib the first cite info:

-----
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501E&L=ADS-L&P=R173
1993 "Reply to Cliff Figallo" in _bit.listserv.words-l_ 15 Jan., Too bad
there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard
accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the "greater
good" when they do things like this.
[http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.words-l/msg/d4a999bb16fa4bac]
-----

Safire writes:

-----
The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an
e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon" at
the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining
about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization
that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim
to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.' " (Lesson: Anything you
crank out on a computer can come back to haunt you centuries later.)
-----

The newsgroup bit.listserv.words-l is not an "email list of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation"  -- Safire was apparently confused by
the fact that this particular post responded to someone from EFF (Mike
Godwin). And the author's email identity is not "rmcdon" but
"rmcdonell" -- in this case, Safire was likely confused by the
email-munging on Google Groups. Anyway, it's not too difficult to
determine that "rmcdonell" is Robert McDonell, a student at UCSD in
the early '90s.


--Ben Zimmer

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