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Judge Pecksniff slammed down his gavel and scanned the crowded docket -- the usual assortment of felons and misdemeanants hauled in by the Grammar Patrol and the Syntax Squad.
The judge addressed the first defendant. State Sen.
Les Fowler, you stand accused of a misdemeanor, to wit,
failure to make a pronoun agree in number with its
antecedent.
The state senator asked for a clarification of the charge.
Pecksniff glanced at his papers. Senator, during the
discussion of the state's banking crisis, you said
The
individual has a responsibility to look at the institution
before they put money into it.
Note that
individual
is singular. You obviously
knew that because you followed individual
with has,
a
singular verb. So far, so good. But the subsequent pronoun
you chose was they,
a plural, when the laws of English
grammar -- and now the laws of Colorado -- require a
pronoun to match its antecedent. You should have said The
individual has a responsibility to look at the institution
before he puts money into it.
Is that clear now?
The senator nodded, admitting his guilt. He then asked
for mercy because his intentions had been honorable. Many
women feel offended by the traditional construction. Using
he or she
avoids giving such offense, at the expense
of convoluted expression. Saying they
instead of
he
or he or she
seemed the most sensible
locution.
Judge Pecksniff nodded. I often hear that excuse,
senator. If you should be arrested again on this charge,
perhaps you will appear before a feminist judge who agrees
with you. But I remind you that in this court, gender is a
grammatical concept, not a physical one. You shall have 30
days to think about grammar and prison
overcrowding.
As the dismayed senator was led away by the bailiff, the next defendant stood before Judge Pecksniff.
C.L. Robertson, you are the superintendent of Salida
schools. As an educator, you have a special responsibility
to the language. I see here that you prepared your
district's Statement of Major Educational Objectives. You
wrote that your students might
obtain interest and ability
of skills.
Aside from the fact that this expression is
perfectly meaningless, it also violates the law which
requires parallel construction. Sixty days or a thousand
dollars.
Down went the gavel, and a new violator appeared. She worked at a newsstand. An undercover agent had purchased a copy of Art-Language magazine from her.
Miss, the evidence before me demonstrates that you
sold a magazine whose prose -- whatever it is -- is not
good English, and is therefore illegal now that English is
our official language. Here is a typical example.
Rather
think of a pathway of a sequence of gedankenexperiment
simpletons where heir-lines are a prima facie case of a
paradiachronic transitivity.
The frightened defendant conceded selling the magazine, but protested that it was impossible for her to read everything that appeared on the rack.
You'll just have to be more careful in the
future,
Judge Pecksniff told her. Thirty days,
suspended.
The jurist scanned his courtroom and looked at his docket, trying to match the defendants to their crimes.
Which one was the newspaper editor who didn't know the
difference between flaunt
and flout
? The one
who often used like
as a conjunction?
Where were the writers who butchered the language? He
spotted one who looked pretentious. She had to be the
author who feloniously employed comprise
as a
synonym for compose.
She'd been in here before when
she demonstrated her ignorance of the difference between
uninterested
and disinterested.
The flaky-looking trio in back must be the advertising
copywriters who used barbarous locutions like
gifting
and parenting.
But maybe they were
the computer writers charged with verbal redundancy. They
always wrote RAM memory
when RAM
stands for
Random-Access Memory.
They could never say that
something frees a slot
; instead, it always frees
up a slot.
Judge Pecksniff smiled to himself. He had once opposed making English the official language of Colorado. But it had worked out pretty well. Like most people who majored in English in college, he couldn't find a job. Despite the degree with honors, life had been tough for a long time. Now he was a judge, and he was getting even.
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