From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 22:58:24 MDT
At 09:35 PM 8/24/01 -0700, Michaels of all kinds wrote:
>> This is one of the most wryly funny things I've heard from Eugene on
>> this list.
>For what it's worth, I got it, too.
I should imagine that everyone with half a brain got *'gene's* joke, Mike.
What puzzles me is how Mike Lorrey thought this nice little jest covered
the terms of his own apparently bizarre utterance, which I conveniently
left framed by its original context:
=========
At 05:48 PM 8/22/01 -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>> "eugenics" ...
>> an extremely loaded term when used in public. It's loaded enough that it
>> would really be a good idea to find a better word.
>Only among people who have no sense of humor.
>>the real strike against the term is that the Nazis used
>> it to mean the selective killing of people the government didn't like. At
>> this point, there's no way to disassociate the term from that meaning.
===================
Eugene's little merriment wasn't the start of the thread, of course, so I
(and others) failed to understand how ML could make that statement in the
context above. Seeing later that he thought he was commenting on 'gene's
witticism, it finally made sense, but remains open to exactly the kind of
noxious misunderstanding that the framing discussion was warning of.
Damien Broderick
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