Replies

From Monday's NYT column by the hate filled Bob Herbert:

"A few years ago, when he was governor of Virginia, Mr. Allen issued a proclamation declaring April "Confederate History and Heritage Month." From Mr. Allen's pro-Confederate perspective, the Civil War was a struggle for "independence and sovereign rights." Independence, in this case, does not refer to the independence of black slaves.

I'd like to know if Senator Allen feels we'd all have been better off if the South had won the Civil War. It's a fair enough question. Mr. Allen loved the old Confederacy so much he displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. He was a little touchy about it, though. When someone accused him of flying the flag in his living room, he took umbrage. "It was never flying," he said. "It was nailed to a wall."

Do you think Mr. Herbert will go and see his fellow Democrat,Senator KKK, in his movie debut??

RE: Bob Herbert (and his ilk)

toad·y

pl. toad·ies

A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons; a sycophant.

Inflected forms: toad·ied, toad·y·ing, toad·ies

ETYMOLOGY: From toad.

WORD HISTORY: The earliest recorded sense (around 1690) of toady is “a little or young toad,” but this has nothing to do with the modern usage of the word. The modern sense has rather to do with the practice of certain quacks or charlatans who claimed that they could draw out poisons. Toads were thought to be poisonous, so these charlatans would have an attendant eat or pretend to eat a toad and then claim to extract the poison from the attendant. Since eating a toad is an unpleasant job, these attendants came to epitomize the type of person who would do anything for a superior, and toadeater (first recorded 1629) became the name for a flattering, fawning parasite. Toadeater and the verb derived from it, toadeat, influenced the sense of the noun and verb toad and the noun toady, so that both nouns could mean “sycophant” and the verb toady could mean “to act like a toady to someone.”