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> 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.)