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THIS IS about the Second Kelsey Outrage.
History buffs might think that I'm giving that label to the tearing down last month of the little red barn in Huntington where the first Kelsey Outrage-a juicy American scandal complete with sex, betrayal, a tar-and-feathering, a bodily desecration and a murder- occurred in 1872.
The loss of the site is a heartbreak, but not an outrage. The barn was collapsing, and its conscientious owner had been warned by a lawyer-neighbor that, if anyone got hurt, it would be the owner's fault. Today, nothing's left at the Platt Place site but a blue and yellow sign marking the spot.
No, the Second Kelsey Outrage is Long Island's lack of credit for the venerable cliche that was born of the first outrage. The phrase, which will not be repeated in its entirety here, starts "as dead as Kelsey's . . ." It is "a salacious simile for a comparative state of mortality," to quote words penned by my editorial board colleague, Robert Wiemer.
Here we have a locker-room phrase used from coast to coast, repeated by Dennis Quaid in "The Big Easy," uttered spitefully by Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, and no one knows it's ours.
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