a snappy quote, not in YBQ

Charles C Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Fri Sep 13 21:14:20 UTC 2013


And the quotation doesn't say every city that hosts a university wants to be (or will become) a great city.

--Charlie
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Laurence Horn [laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 3:27 PM
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On Sep 13, 2013, at 2:28 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:

> Presumably Sexton was talking about Columbia. :)  But the statement is clearly fallacious, as it would imply that New Haven, Ithaca, Princeton, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, and other small towns with major universities are "world-class cities" or will become world-class cities in the future.
>
> Fred Shapiro

I was going to mention New Haven, but I thought I'd leave it to others.  And I'm not sure that Oxford and Cambridge, inter alia, are world-class cities, and they've had plenty of time to become so.  Of course we're just assuming that the world-class city is the same one that hosts the great university.  That's implied, but not directly asserted, in the quote.

LH
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of George Thompson [george.thompson at nyu.edu]
> Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 12:13 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: a snappy quote, not in YBQ
>
> I throw this out among you, rather in the spirit of one tossing a pilchard
> toward a rock full of seals.
>
> From the New Yorker, September 9, 2013, p. 67, col. 3, in a profile of John
> Sexton, president of New York University.
>
> He repeated a quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "If you want to
> build a world-class city, build a great university and wait two hundred
> years."
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>
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