Poor Jeffrey Rosen. He evidently thought he had a boffo lede for his cover story on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He bumped into Justice Ginsburg at the opera, where Mozart's Cosi fan tutte was playing. The "traditional translation of the title," writes Rosen, is " Never Trust a Woman." Ginsburg -- looking at Rosen "indulgently with her unblinking eyes" -- pointed out that the title was "in the third person plural," so that "They are all like that' would be a more accurate translation." Rosen continues: "And so, she said, there was no reason to assume from the title that Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, approved of male infidelity any more than they approved of female infidelity, or that they thought women inherently more or less trustworthy than men." Rosen grandly concludes that "Justice Ginsburg's elegant reconception of the 18th-century text epitomizes the vision of mainstream, equal-treatment feminism that she [has] championed."
Ginsburg and Rosen are both talking nonsense. The word tutte means all WOMEN, not all PEOPLE (that would be tutti). That is why the "traditional" title is not Rosen's "Never Trust a Woman," but "All Women Are Like That." Pardon the pedantry, but if Justice Ginsburg "reconceptualizes" this 18th- century text so freely, what about that other 18th-century text that she has to interpret every day -- the Constitution of the United States?