Conventional Wisdom

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Mar 10 17:09:01 UTC 2008


At 12:10 PM -0400 3/10/08, Baker, John wrote:
>         The New York Times again is claiming that Galbraith invented
>"conventional wisdom," see
>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/weekinreview/09leibovich.html.  We
>discussed this in 2006, and it's clearly much older.  I can take it back
>to the anonymous An Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of
>the American Government 35 (1838) (Google Books full text):  "it will be
>seen that we appeal in such a case, neither to the records of
>legislation, nor yet to the conventional wisdom of our forefathers".
>(For the full and nearly interminable sentence,

That was when semicolons grew on trees, before the current shortage.

LH

>  see
>http://books.google.com/books?id=XWcEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA35&dq=%22conventional
>+wisdom%22.)  Can anyone do better?
>
>
>John Baker
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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