Monday, April 06, 2020

Dr. V's rare grammatical error

Spot the error (from this post):

Trump has merely made its presence more evident by standing up and fighting for the conservative cause, something that milque-toast Mitt and his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing.

Dr. V. is normally pitch-perfect with his grammar, so this is a very rare error. His posts contain typos, but typos are just typos and not worth castigating. We all make typos. Hint: I'm not focusing on the archaic rendering of "milquetoast" as a hyphenated compound, although "milque-toast" is, given its origins, technically erroneous. No: this error goes a bit deeper.



3 comments:

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Is the problem with "its"? In the quote below, "its" seems to refer to the "conservative cause":

Trump has merely made its presence more evident by standing up and fighting for "the conservative cause, something that milque-toast Mitt and his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing.

But in context (see link), "its" clearly refers to "the poison" that has entered the American soul.

Jeffery Hodges

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Kevin Kim said...

Jeff,

I did ponder whether to insert something [in brackets] to clarify what the "its" referred to; the sentence, when ripped out of context, seems to need some fleshing out. You're right: in context, the "its" has a proper antecedent, so that's not the problem. By divorcing the sentence from its original context, I probably introduced an unnecessary ambiguity. Apologies.

What I saw as an egregious error was one that two years of teaching SAT grammar in northern Virginia trained me to see: the faulty parallelism in the phrase "...his ilk were unwilling and incapable of doing."

You can't be "unwilling of doing" something, so at the very least, there's a "to" missing, and if we add the "to," then we also need to add the bare infinitive "do" to have the full infinitive "to do."

A possible rewrite might be:

"...his ilk were unwilling to do and incapable of doing."

We could get truly wordy and add a second "were" before "incapable," but that strikes me as unwieldy, not to mention unnecessary.

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Thanks for the reply, Kevin. I think I'd never have noticed the problem with parallelism even though lack of parallelism is one of my pet peeves.

Jeffery Hodges

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