At the end of a quite interesting column about reading directionality, Cecil states:
Note, however, that this column is “Classic Cecil”, dated May 28 1976.
Barring the possibility that Cecil mastered time travel, it looks like there was a recent update to this column, but it isn’t marked as such. I think that not declaring the part an update brings into question whether other Cecil columns have also been altered ex post facto.
I already brought this to attention of this board when a reference to Jenny Jones was inserted into the middle of a 70s article, but there it was probably added back when it was fresh - to a published book or previous AOL update perhaps.
This was clearly an addendum to something the editor found when referencing this article that gave a bit more context to the article, but I agree that such changes are very jarring in context of the provided date; it does seem wrong that the update isn’t at least acknowledged for posterity who might think in the mid 70s that both the internet was widespread and Jenny Jones was well known.
The answer, of course, is that the date of the columns is only the date the original column appeared. We’ve noted multiple times before that the updated references (which often came about during the AOL years) get a bit difficult to keep straight, but it’s almost impossible at this time, I imagine, to be able to tell exactly which columns were updated when.
I don’t feel that it’s important to give the date of the update as much as it’s important to let the reader know which parts of the column are updates from the original column. But if Ed lost track of the previous versions, I guess that might not be feasible either.