Tuesday, July 1, 2014

On the left, Democrats. On the right, Republicans


Posted by Joe at 12:00 AM

2 comments:

Shaw Kenawe said...

Joe, you shouldn't believe everything you read in those conservative blast emails:


From PolitiFact:

"We are all familiar with a herd of cows, a flock of chickens, a school of fish and a gaggle of geese," the e-mail begins. "However, less widely known is a pride of lions, a murder of crows (as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens), an exaltation of doves and, presumably because they look so wise, a parliament of owls.

"Now consider a group of baboons. They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates. And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons? Believe it or not ... a Congress! I guess that pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington!"

"We at PolitiFact have learned from experience to be skeptical of anything we see in the contagion of e-mails we receive. But we wondered, since we're always skeptical of our own skepticism, could this just be a joke, or could this little tidbit be true?

First stop: Dictionary.com. None of the definitions for congress referred to baboons, apes, monkeys or primates. A "congress" can be a meeting or session of any group, but the e-mail makes it clear that this is a specific term for a gathering of baboons.

Merriam-Webster.com also produced negative results. So did the online version of the Oxford Dictionary and the 2,059-page Random House Unabridged Dictionary from 1973 in our newsroom.

Two places where we did find it were sources in which virtually anybody could insert a definition on a whim: Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.com. (In the Urban Dictionary, someone added the definition on Sept. 3, 2011, in response to the e-mail.)"

July 2, 2014 at 12:56 PM
Joe said...

SK: OK, OK. Let's just turn it around. A group of Congressmen is called a baboon.

July 2, 2014 at 4:25 PM

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