Cassidy

[Mark Mandel]

On 10/16/07, Gerald Cohen <gcohen at umr.edu> wrote:
>
>
> No doubt there's a lot of bathwater in his book. But if even a single one
> of
> Cassidy's numerous proposed etymologies turns out to be correct, his book
> will not be totally without value.
>

(I have not read the book, though I have read some posts of his. For the
following arithmetic I am assuming that David's correspondent's evaluation,
and those of regular listies Wilson, John, Jonathan, Grant, and Doug (and
possibly others I've missed) are correct.)

Adding the large negative value of the baloney, spread of misinformation,
and encouraging others in his own sort of cavalier attitude toward language,
to the small positive value of any crumb of reality that may actually be in
there, he still comes out with a large negative value, which may be
visualized as down in a pit or neck-deep in B.S.

And that's granting him the benefit of the doubt on anything that might be
correct. If you fire a shotgun in the general direction of a rifle target,
you may indeed score a few points and even a bulls-eye, but it's not by
marksmanship.

m a m

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