re: #451 Hecuba’s daughter

In real life, Chovanec is likely surrounded by brilliant but generally amoral investment advisers who joke like that all the time. It probably came as a shock to him that anyone would interpret his statement literally.

But that’s been true for a long time — for decades columnists have discovered to their shock that no matter how obvious they think their parody is, someone (and maybe most readers) will take their words as gospel truth.

An instructor of freshman composition once told me that most of her students thought Swift’s A Modest Proposal was serious.