Original-From: mhwpa!ktw (Kenneth T Wolman +1 201 564 2866)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 08:34:00 EDT
From:         ktw@MHWPA.ATT.COM
Subject:      Re: Gleanings (57)
Comments: To: English Language Discussion Group <WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>

Boy, I was busy last week, wasn't I?  All these things with my name on
them....

> 1) Thaw-White case (Ken W.)

I don't remember all the details.  The Thaw-White murder in April 1906
was one of the most sensational events in New York, or perhaps
anywhere: "lifestyles of the rich and famous" and all that.  Harry
Kendall Thaw was the scion of a very wealthy Pittsburgh family, who
became obsessed with and married a chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbitt.
(Someone I knew years ago took a look at one of her photographs and
said "Anyone that beautiful can't be real.") There is plenty to
suggest that Thaw was a borderline psychotic.  He may not have known
that his wife, who was still in her teens, had been the mistress of
Stanford White, senior partner in the architectural firm of Mead,
McKim & White, and all over art history books as one of the most
distinguished architects this country ever produced.  White is
supposed to have shipped Nesbitt to a private clinic in Pompton Lakes,
New Jersey when she was 15 to have an abortion.  How Thaw found out
about his wife's "past" I don't recall.  What is indisputable is that
he _did_ find out, and may also have learned that it was not simply
"past," either.  He marched into the roof garden theater of Madison
Square Garden, then on 26th Street, during a performance of a
forgotten show called _Mademoiselle Champagne_, shot Stanford White to
death, and waited to be arrested.  In the pandemonium, witnesses later
heard him say either "He ruined my life" or "He ruined my wife." The
newspapers had a blast at the trial.  Propriety in 1906 didn't allow
for overt sleaze, but for plenty of implication.  Thaw got off by
reason of insanity, and I heard a story a few years ago that Evelyn
Nesbitt was murdered in 1944 by a young man she'd brought home....

> 3) Maimonides' 13 Principles of Faith (Ken W.)
Most Orthodox Jewish prayerbooks print the text of the principles of
Judaism expounded by Moses Maimonides.  I don't have a copy here, but
they express a belief in the existence of an incorporeal but real God,
absolute faith in the Torah--including the words of the Prophets and
commentators--as the revealed word of God, and absolute faith in the
coming of the Messiah.  "Though he tarry, I will await him."

> 4) "Hockey-puck!" (Ken W.)
An old Don Rickles insult.

> 9) _Social Text_/Stanley Fish/Catherine MacKinnon/Radix Malorum (Ken W.)

Oh shit.  Social Text is a highly left-wing, academic Marxist journal
that did stuff like write commentaries on the Shell Answer Man as a
capitalist tool.  I'm not being facetious, but I am reducing its value
and seriousness a bit, I guess: the issues I've seen are quite
rigorous but you would think that the authors of the articles never
had to deal with a garage mechanic or a plumber.  Stanley Fish is at
Duke, where I think he holds a joint appointment on the English and
Law faculties.  He is one of the leading proponents of "politically
correct" speech and has described the First Amendment as a totem (my
word, not his) that should be reconsidered because it is a smokescreen
for liberal oppression.  Catherine MacKinnon is a law professor at the
University of Michigan who has written on feminist law and favors
censorship of pornography, howsoever _THAT_ is defined.  "Radix
Malorum" means "root of all evil," and was my snide comment about how
Professor MacKinnon views men in this society.

>11) Jim Florio/Antonio Gramsci (Ken W.)
Florio is the Governor of New Jersey.  Antonio Gramsci was an Italian
Marxist philosopher whose concept of Hegemony has enabled Marxists to
work the products of culture as well as pure economics.  Anyone who
is intimate with Gramsci's works is invited to correct this, by the
way....  I haven't looked at them in a few years.

>12) Talk Radio (Ken W.)

Genre of radio call-in shows where people get to hold forth to a host
who often is as ill-mannered and/or condescending as they are
uninformed.

>16) CPUSA (Ken W.)
"Communist Party, United States of America."

>23) Ribbit (John Wm.)
Frog noise.  Related to "breep" :-).

Ken
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU