Did the book say “Reprinted with permission?” If not, then no.
Given some of the crazy and completely unbalanced e-mails that Cecil receives, and adding to that the existence of some even more fucked up individuals who either are still posting or are banned from the message board, I’d say that Cecil’s desire for privacy is not only understandable, but prudent.
And the Straight Dope isn’t about invading people’s privacy. If Cecil gets a question asking if a specific non-public individual has sex with goats, or what that person’s address is, or even what they look like, I think it’s safe to say that Cecil isn’t going to field that question.
As far as I know there is no legal requirement for such, only the requirement that the author of the original work has in fact conveyed permission. For one of my books I received permission to re-quote a large portion of text from the original author by e-mail, and that was good enough for my publisher. However, if you know otherwise, can you provide me with the cite that it’s legally mandatory under US copyright law for such text to be included?
Don’t feed me this crap. Put up or shut up.
The columns are distinctly worse than they used to be, so there is some cause for thinking that Ed doesn’t write them or at least farms some of them off to, well, to people like you Una, or Dex, since he’s also perpetuating the fantasy.
In any case, put up some proof that Ed is not Cecil. Or that you write some of the columns. Or anything other than this juvenile coyness.
In the meantime you sound like this woman in Maureen Dowd’s column today:
I’m giving you the same response that they got.
It did not. The book in question was Know it All. You can take a look at the copyright page, which says “Copyright 1993 by Ed Zotti.” No mention of Cecil, yet there are several articles (unfortunately, not included in the “Search Within the Book” feature) taken word for word from other Straight Dope books.
Did you quote the text without acknowledging it? Even on high school level, the technical term for this is “plagiarism.”
Thus, either Zotti is a plagiarist or he’s Cecil. You’re choice.
As far as I’m aware, when reproducing large portions of copyrighted works verbatim, some form of attribution is legally required, otherwise you give the appearance of claiming authorship of said material. “Reprinted with permission,” "Portions reprinted with permission"and variants thereof are the most common language used, IME.
I suggest you mail Cecil and ask him how much he wants to tell you about himself.
The columns have changed their tone gradually over the years, this isn’t a recent thing. Reading back since the early 1980’s you can see that there is a change in the scope and direction of the columns since the mid-1990’s, increasing since the mid-2000’s. I’ll speculate on why - first, a lot of the low-hanging fruit questions have been answered by Cecil already. Another factor is that people are asking harder and more technical questions - popular culture/history/basic knowledge questions that used to be asked are falling off, and people are tending to ask Cecil about harder issues. For instance, it seems to me that there are an alarmingly high number of medical-related questions nowadays, and I know that Cecil will look at some, but he really doesn’t like most of them.
There is also a certain level of change in the selection process involved. In some cases I know he rejects what would have been very entertaining article because Wikipedia already covered it well enough and he is loathe to repeat it.
You say the change in the column is indicative of a change in author, I disagree completely. I think, but am not claiming I am absolutely correct, that it’s being driven by the change in the information readily available, the nature of the questions being asked most frequently, and the competing sources of information out there.
I guess if you want to be rude and snarky in GQ, why not?
And what status do you have that makes you privy to what e-mail Cecil gets, or that you have insight into “his” thinking?
Recall that Straight Dope Advisory Board members answer questions directed to The Great Master. So they are privy to at least a portion of Cecil’s email.
Understanding of the recesses of Cecil’s thinking though, can only be accomplished after years of training and meditation.
The whole thing is obviously a complicated conspiracy concocted by the Masons. If you stare at Cecil’s columns really, really hard for 30 minutes, at a distance of six inches from the screen, the Mason symbol clearly emerges.
Oh wait…that’s a smudge where I killed that mosquito…
Only the ones chosen to be posted at the Staff boards by Ed, Dex and possibly a very few chosen others. The average SDSAB member would have no access beyond that. FTR, when I was a member, I saw no “crazy and completely unbalanced” ones posted, though I’ll grant that many of them were…odd.
Embarrassing facial tattoos as a result of a wild weekend in Bangkok.
Just a thought.
Is belief in Cecil a staff requirement? (Or at least, nominal belief in Cecil). 
Nope.
Hee! WHOO! HAW!!! 
Thanks for a good laugh for the start of my day!
[hijack] How come you’re not a SDSAB any more, and when did that happen [/hijack]
Housecleaning. A few months back, Ed announced they’d be removing SDSAB members who hadn’t written at least one report in the previous year. We were all given an opportunity to retain the title by writing one, but I (and some others, apparently) declined to do so. All of us were told we could reclaim the title at any time by submitting a new Staff report. I may or may not do so; I haven’t really decided at this point.
What’s the email address?
No, I offered that as a possibility to give you a face-saving way of stating that Ed may have once been Cecil but that you or others at the high end are now doing much of the work so that technically you can be correct when you say that Ed is not Cecil.
Since you reject that possibility, I can come to no other conclusion except to say that Ed is Cecil.
I will publicly apologize if you provide me with evidence, on or off the board, that I am wrong.
Not to cause too much trouble, but I agree.
If “Cecil” is really dedicated to “the straight dope” then he has to apply it to himself as well. Either put up or shut up.
I mean, hey … I went along with it too. It was fun for a while. But the continued adolation and deification of what even the copyright office says is a fictional character has become just a little too precious now.