Actually, Mods are forbidden from saying anything about Cecil that he hasn’t already said about himself.
He definitely enjoys the discussions about his existence, etc. And that’s why he doesn’t settle the issue for once and all.
Although, how could he? How could he prove his existence to your satisfaction, and still maintain his compulsive-obsession with privacy? A photocopy of a driver’s license? That would contain a photo. A picture of his voter’s registration card? So easily faked. And so on. The skeptics will never be convinced – kind of like those who think the moon-landing was faked, there’s no way to convince them otherwise. Spend millions of dollars sending a satellite around the moon to take pictures of the landing site, and they’ll just say that was faked, too.
No offense, but this is a terrible analogy. Imagine if the government had said, “We’ve put a man on Mars” and then steadfastly, patently refused to release even one single photograph documenting the mission, instead getting all cutesy-poo and winking when questioned. People would be fools to believe it.
roger thornhill said something above that bears repeating:
The fact that he values his privacy (perhaps obsessively so) should, it seems to me, be respected.
Hey, roger, suppose that you help the “fight against ignorance” by posting on the internet your home address and phone number, your social security number, bank accounts, your picture, and your credit card numbers (with expiration dates.) After all, we’re all ignorant about those, aren’t we? Do you think that the “fight against ignorance” means a complete disregard for personal privacy?
Oh, but wait, I forgot, you’re the famous roger thornhill alias “Mr Kaplan”, a government agent who moves from city to city, right?
Chorpler, the type of studies you’re talking about can be done, but they are extremely tedious and time-consuming. First, you have to compile the documents, then (and this is the real trick) identify those usages which show significant variance, then start compiling the data.
Since the first 2 Cecils wrote only for 2 or 3 years each, we have relatively little to go on there. Add to that the possibility that Ed may have used some of their unpublished columns during his tenure, and it gets murkier, although if we omit, say, the first 2 years of Ed’s columns we can probably eliminate this noise.
If Mike, Dave, and Ed share a regional/social dialect, the task will be very difficult indeed, maybe impossible, especially since they are all writing “in character”.
But if you did this and found, for example, that columns during Mike’s tenure often indicated disjuncts with a sentence initial “Now, --” but none of the Dave- or Ed-era columns did, you’d have something. Same with a preference for “for instance” over “for example” or anything else that empirically demonstrates a clear and statistically significant break between the sets. But you have to have several of these to get to the point where you’ll convince anyone that you’ve demonstrated something.
Personally, I would LOVE to do exactly this dull, tedious, hours-and-hours-of-detail-work study. But I don’t have time.
Especially since I have to finish my tables so QtM has a place to put his lamps!
The quote is attributed to Mr. Zotti himself. Perhaps this was before the Cone of Secrecy descended.
This stamps one column as pre-Zotti based on biographical information alone–the one in which “Cecil” discusses belonging to the Cub Scouts before 1955. This column is included in the first Straight Dope book but not in the archive. One assumes that it must have been written before 1978. I couldn’t find the age of Michael Lenehan or Dave Kehr online.
I sense that our seekers may be getting a wee too nigh Gondolin, and that the pass of the Noldor may soon be closed against them by the son of Fingolfin.
At least you quoted the date correctly, but that’s all.
Read the original article, and you’ll find:
So, the author of that piece, Suein L. Hwang, made the assertion. The quote is NOT attributed to Mr. Zotti. And her/his source was…ta da! Mr. Livengood. One can only hope that he didn’t get his degree, given his abilities exhibited in the above quotes.
It’s taking incredibly longer than one could imagine.
Appearances are deceiving. The article makes a statement, and then quotes Ed Zotti. There is no disputing that Ed “does” (i.e., works for) the Straight Dope.
Sigh. The bit where Ed is quoted is in quotation marks. He is quoted as saying that he doesn’t do ‘Straight Dope’ for money, but it’s not unremunerative. Ed is not quoted as saying he wears the Cecil cloak.
Looking at the article, I can’t see why samclem says that Hwang’s source was Livengood. S/he suggests confirmation of Livengood’s suspicion, but doesn’t source it. Ed=Cecil is asserted earlier too
But Ed is not quoted as saying he’s Cecil.
Now I’m off to search to see whether there’s been progress on
BTW, it’s amusing that Livengood doesn’t believe Cecil Adams is real because “How can one man know so much!” To leap from that to saying that “Cecil Adams” is really Ed Zotti doesn’t escape the incredulity of one man knowing so much, does it?
Ed has learned a lot over the years, from needing to fact-check and edit what Cecil tell him. But, Ed doesn’t know as much as Cecil knows.
