{"id":27,"date":"2005-04-22T15:22:28","date_gmt":"2005-04-22T20:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=27"},"modified":"2007-09-03T16:53:38","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T20:53:38","slug":"naive-question-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Naive Question I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#146;re going to call the new Pope &#147;the Grand Inquisitor&#148; because he once headed the organization long ago known as the Inquisition, shouldn&#146;t you be consistent? Somewhere in Massachusetts (Salem, I guess) there must a judge you can call &#147;Witchburner&#148; because he sits on the same bench long ago occupied by a judge who sentenced witches to be burned at stake. (Probably in other towns, too, though Salem&#146;s witches are the best-known.) And I suppose you could call the current chief judge in Fort Smith, Arkansas &#147;the Hangin&#146; Judge&#148; as if he were somehow responsible for the deeds of his predecessor, Isaac Parker. But wouldn&#146;t that be an obviously stupid thing to do?  Not to mention potentially libelous. (Note to judges in Salem and Fort Smith: I said you <em>could<\/em> say such a thing, not that I do say it, or ever would.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> (4\/27, 1:00 am)<\/p>\n<p>I had a nagging feeling there was something I needed to check before posting: for &#147;Witchburner&#148; read &#147;Witchhanger&#148; (or &#147;Witchstretcher&#148;?), and see the first comment for why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#146;re going to call the new Pope &#147;the Grand Inquisitor&#148; because he once headed the organization long ago known as the Inquisition, shouldn&#146;t you be consistent? Somewhere in Massachusetts (Salem, I guess) there must a judge you can call &#147;Witchburner&#148; because he sits on the same bench long ago occupied by a judge who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}