--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > What I think is hilarious is that Judy has now > pissed away almost all of her posts for the week > "defending" this idea (that I personally think > she made up) that "transcendental meditation" > was a common term at the time Maharishi first > began using it.
Didn't make it up, have made only 12 posts on the topic, hardly "almost all of [my] posts for the week." I think it's an interesting issue, so none of those posts were "pissed away," as far as I'm concerned. I had no idea it would be controversial. I assumed everyone had heard the same complaints I had. <snip> > On the other hand, within a few hours she'll be > out of our hair for the rest of the week, and > people will be able to post again without her > attempting to suck them into arguments. Barry's delighted that this discussion (which Lawson "sucked" me into) has taken attention away from the howling blooper Barry made in dumping on Janet for using "gnostic" in its original, generic sense after she'd explained exactly how she was using it and explictly pointed out that "Gnostic" (cap G) was the way to refer to the specific religious system. Then, when I pointed out his error, instead of just backing off, which would have ended the whole discussion, Barry tried to suck *me* into an argument, compounding his error by drawing a ludicrously bogus analogy with the phrase "transcendental meditation." There are a whole bunch of *other* reasons it's bogus besides the one I cited. And, true to form, Barry went on to *triple* his error by declaring it was ridiculous to claim lower-casing a term allowed one to redefine it. The issue was whether *capping* a term allowed one to redefine it, first; and second, of course, there are any number of examples of precisely that taking place, including gnostic/Gnostic. I cited the Oxford English Dictionary's entry showing its two different definitions for that term, one for the original lower case, one for the later capitalized version. I listed several other examples, including catholic/ Catholic, and my favorite in his case: know-nothing/ Know-Nothing. So, having been definitively wiped out on that issue, naturally Barry is doing his damndest to focus attention on the side-argument that developed between Lawson and me over transcendental meditation/ Transcendental Meditation, hoping desperately that everyone will forget how grossly in error he was. It really is Essence of Barry.
