A Bouquet AND a Brickbat to Ted Koppel

[SoCalDem]

I just watched his commencement address he gave at USC..

While i thought it was great, I am more than a little peeved at him for keeping his mouth shut for all those years when he had a large audience. He did not suddenly arrive at the conclusions he spoke of.

He was like all the others...cowed into a complicit silence.

of course, now that he's secured his cushy pension and has a new gig on cable( an probably the ever-present book deal), he's bravely stating the obvious... that of which we all have known for more than half a decade, as we bashed our heads against walls, to no avail.

This is well worth watching..






http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=17863&fID=345

[jgraz]

1. What actually is a brickbat?

Just askin...

[SoCalDem]

2. dictionary definition

Definitions of brickbat:

* noun: blunt criticism
* noun: a fragment of brick used as a weapon

[jgraz]

3. Ouch...blunt criticism indeed

I wonder who was the first person to come up with the idea of equating criticism with smashing in someone's skull with a brick. I'll have to pull out the OED tomorrow, but I'm guessing either Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker.

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

4. etymology for 'brickbat'

The earliest sense of brickbat, first recorded in 1563, was “a piece of brick.” Such pieces of brick have not infrequently been thrown at others in the hope of injuring them; hence, the figurative brickbats (first recorded in 1929) that critics hurl at performances they dislike. The appearance of bat as the second part of this compound is explained by the fact that the word bat, “war club, cudgel,” developed in Middle English the sense “chunk, clod, wad,” and in the 16th century came to be used specifically for a piece of brick that was unbroken on one end. source

[undeterred]

5. He's an incredibly intelligent man

I went to a live town hall meeting in the early nineties in Illinois on 'health care' and I was amazed at how well he knew the subject (this was about the time Hillary was trying to do something about it) and how smooth he was at handling a live audience. Especially considering all the other subjects he knows so well as you can tell from watching him interview world leaders. Anyone that smart leans to the left, and I've always believed that he does. I've never been able to figure out why he took such a back seat at ABC.