> In a message dated 4/26/2007 9:42:11 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> Where were you brought up, anyway, in a cow shed?
>
> Probably in America where the line "Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln" is a
> quite
> common expression, albeit a rather sick one. It's the punch line to a
> famous joke which escapes me right now. Google it - there's pages and
> pages of it.
>
> No biggie.....If you want an apology that's fine.....but I, for one, don't
> need or want to be part of some group demand.
>
> Lo
Thank you Laura. I feel that if any apologies are called for, I am the one
to whom such is due.
The reference to a cowshed I find *exceedingly offensive, perhaps even
racist, given my Scottish background.
Mz. Printz is obviously repeating the slur in Sam Johnson's _Dictionary_,
where he defines OATS as "a grain in England eaten by cattle and in Scotland
by the people."
[Under the shade of a bonny briar bush in a kailyard somewhere in USAmerica]
(As for my American credentials, I think I may be one of the few people to
know that Mike Walsh was -- much to the satisfaction of George Matsell, then
New York chief of police, whom he had famously described as "300 of blubber
and meanness" -- murdered by Boss Tweed in 1859. And let's not go into the
Astor Place Riot a few years earlier, another tragedy turning on the
performance of a Shakespeare play, with Mike Walsh, Captain Ryders, and Ned
Buntline on one side of the barricades and Chief Matsell on the other.
A Belated Spartacist.)
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