the Marxit (tm) thing comes from another list, where some of us knew Doug before he started LBO. Someone typoed Marxist on a thread claiming some people weren't _real_ Marxits (tm). Someone then wrote back with a play on the Dr. Pepper jingle: "I'm a Marxit, You're a Marxit, Wouldn't ya like to be a Marxit, too?" It was just one of those things that had everyone on the list in stitches.
Why "gnomes" though?
Snit
^^^^^
Oh, I see. Mine came up when I was looking at the word "market" one day, and I thought we want to move from the market to the marxit.
"Gnomes" is ridiculously obscure. In about 1974, I wrote a "poem" about epistemology of science. There was an anthropological journal called "Notes and Queries" so in the poem I switched it to "Gnomes and Queries" to make it more visual.
Hey in the poem I awarded Hempel's streaking rose, for meeting Hempel's standard of open disclosure of assumptions ( or something like that). You were talking about Hempel the other day.
Chas.