"You got a mouse (etc.) in your pocket?"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Yeah, Conkling was an interesting character, but he was one of the major villains of American history.  He had a lot of personal defects, with his big negative contribution being to perjure himself in order to clinch the acceptance by the Supreme Court of the phony theory that the 14th amendment was intended not so much to protect the rights of African-Americans as to protect the rights of corporations.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Ann Burlingham [ann at BURLINGHAMBOOKS.COM]
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 3:08 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "You got a mouse (etc.) in your pocket?"

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "You got a mouse (etc.) in your pocket?"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>
>> And was it really Mark Twain who came up with the version that
>> permits kings, editors, and those with tapeworms to use the first
>> person plural?  Or is that a case of generalized attribution?  (Sorry,
>> Fred, I don't have a YBOQ handy.)
>
> I'm also away from my YB(o)Q, but the earliest cites I can find are attributed
> to New York Senator Roscoe Conkling:


Apropos of nothing, I was just reading the NYS Legislature's memorial
volume on Conkling, full of men expounding at length about how they
would not expound at length. (The sort of book one finds in my house.)
>From the quote, I can see why they missed him.

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