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.
Is the problem with "its"? In the quote below, "its" seems to refer to the "conservative cause":
ReplyDeleteTrump 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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Jeff,
ReplyDeleteI 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
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