From: gbrown@Rosie.UH.EDU (G. Brown)
Subject: Re: Integrity
Reply-To: gbrown@Rosie.UH.EDU
Organization: University of Houston
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 06:12:48 GMT

In article <carlson.721539119@cwis>, carlson@cwis.unomaha.edu (Brian D. Carlson) writes:
>	Charles Dickens spelled potato with an 'e' on the end.

Oh God!  Yet another lame attempt to defend Mr. Potatoe Head.  This one sent
me scurrying off to check the one passage I happen to know in which Dickens
used the term, "potato."  It is the famous one from _A Christmas Carol_ in
which the Ghost of Marley asks Scrooge why he doubts his senses.  Scrooge
replies:  "Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the 
stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of
mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."  That's right--
*potato*, Mr. Carlson, *not* potatoe.  I confess that my copy of _A Christmas
Carol_ is not an original edition, but I think my edition preserves Dickens'
spelling faithfully.  If not, then supply some credible evidence that Dickens
wrote "potatoe" in the passage I have the cited.  Or provide some other
evidence that Dickens was in the habit of spelling "potato" as "potatoe."
Otherwise your claim here is simply unsubstantiated bullshit.  But I am a
bit puzzled by what your point might be.  Should you actually find an
authentic Dickens' passage in which "potatoe" occurs, would you mean to suggest
that this makes "potatoe" an acceptable spelling for "potato" in 20th-
century English?  By what tortured logic?  Or would you mean to suggest that
Dickens himself misspelled "potato" and hence take that to show that Danbo
isn't any dumber than Dickens, who is, after all, supposed to have been
pretty darn smart?  In that case I should want evidence that "potato," and
not "potatoe," was the *standardized* spelling in the England of the mid-
nineteenth century, just as we (but not Danbo) know that "potato" is the
standardized spelling in the English-speaking world of the late 20th century.
Lacking that, my dear, you're just blowin' air.  

>
>	I guess people aren't ready for a man with integrity in public
>office. Dan Quayle will go down in history as a man who didn't sell out his
>convictions for special interest. It seems that people aren't ready for that,
>hence the election of Bill Clinton.

You actually believe that *Dan Quayle* "will go down in history"?!  Only if
the history of light comedy becomes a major academic discipline.

>
>	When you think of all Dan has endured for the last four years, I
>don't know of many men (or women) who could have taken the useless abuse
>that Quayle has taken. When you think of Gore and Clinton being about the
>same age as Quayle, and I haven't heard pokes at them for not being over 
>fifty and in the Oval office.

We poke fun at Danbo not because he's young, but because he's *stupid*.  Get
it?

>
>	When Clinton spelled Capital in an official government memo, where
>were the English teacher journalists to pounce on him for it?

Again, could you please be bothered to supply *some* reference?  What was the
context?  Do you mean he wrote "capital" when the context called for "capitol,"
or what?

>
>	Gore thinks the internal combustion engine is public enemy number
>one (yet he rode the campain bus) and nobody barbs at him for his lunacy.
                      ^^^^^^^
I wonder.  Did Dickens spell "campaign" as "campain"?  

>
>	Clinton made a lot of promises about what he'd do for us in the first
>hundred days of office, and now he's saying 'let's not get our hopes up,
>I can't perform miracles'

Sounds reasonable to me. If he said he *could* perform miracles, the religious
right lunatics would only accuse him of blasphemy--and we wouldn't want that,
would we?
>
>	I guess I just wonder when the biased press is going to hold the
>same standards up against the people they set up in office.

Buffalo Springfield said it best:  "Paranoia runs deep."
>
>brian d carlson
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| Gregory Brown          |   "God is, as it were, the sewer into which       |
| Dept. of Philosophy    |           all contradictions flow"                |
| University of Houston  |                                                   |
| Houston, TX 77204-3785 |               --G. W. F. Hegel                    |
| GBROWN@JETSON.UH.EDU   |        Lectures on the History of Philosophy      |
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