Thursday, May 01, 2003

A fascist jackbooted liberal member of the politically correct thought police is criticizing conservative newspapers for using what he sees as the patronizing word "kin" in reference to the relatives of a boy from North Carolina...

...no, wait, excuse me -- that's no liberal, it's my good buddy Lee, from the ultramegaconservative blog Right-Thinking from the Left Coast, who denounced this use of "kin" not once, but twice in the same day, once when he was ascribing it to the San Francisco Chronicle, then later when he realized the article that set off his snit originated at The New York Times. The offending headline? Hide the babies, here it is:

Missing boy's kin let their hopes rise

(Yeah, that's me in the comments, pointing out a San Francisco Chronicle review that talks about the "kin" of Anne Elliot in a film adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion and a New York Times article that talks about serious New York City shoppers and their "hard-shopping kin" in other cities. Shopping and Jane Austen! Lighten up, dude -- any word used in a coastal newspaper in reference to either of these subjects is, by definition, not offensive.)

Lee also objects to a Times reference to Baghdad as "the conquered Iraqi capital." He prefers "liberated."

(Yeah? Really? Did the Iraqi people get self-government while I wasn't looking?)

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