New Yorker

[James A. Landau]

On Tue 02/13/07 at the whiching hour of 12:06 AM Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU> quoted:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

I cannot figure out how this quote is relevant to the question I posed, namely whether The New Yorker magazine provides enough circulation for a phrase to make it part of everyday English.

Also I can provide a dubious, sort-of, antedating to this phrase.  Back around 1993, before the Internet had become the everyday tool it now is, there was considerable media speculation over who it was who had written the novel "Primary Colors".  My favorite was a cartoon showing Chelsea Clinton's cat Socks at a typewriter pounding out the typescript of "Primary Colors".

OT: "fanny pack" is a misnomer since a sensible person would wear it in front.  Wearing it in back over the buttocks is an invitation to someone to sneak up, unzip it, and pilfer.  It joins the list of such misnomers as "dry cleaning" (which uses a liquid solvent) or "OEM" ("Original Equipment Manufacturer"), a company that puts its own label on equipment made by others, or "grand jury investigates" (a grand jury does no investigation; it listens to a prosecutor describe a completed investigation), or "Internet cafe", which does not necessarily serve coffee.  By the way, in Michigan, at least in the 1960's, a judge could declare himself a "one-man grand jury".

OT: Those who consider French the ideal legal language can take heart in the knowledge that England continued to use French for law courts (Oyez! Oyez!) long after the educated classes in England had, for all other purposes, given up Norman French in favor of that ungainly hybrid known as English.
    I am told of the law student who was tracing back some legal doctrine (it may have been felony homicide) through English court decisions and gave up when he got so far back that the court records were in French.  (His law professor was all for continuing.)

    Jim Landau


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