Grammar we can believe in
John McCain’s presidential campaign is running the above ad all over the Internet. While McCain thinks his opponent is a threat to common sense, it seems, John McCain is a bigger threat to something more important: the English language. So I’d like to pose a few questions to the senior Senator from Arizona.
- Is it OK to split an infinitive?
- Is it OK to capitalize randomly the first letters of some words but not others?
Elect a leader with good grammar.
Politics | Benjamin Kabak, June 12, 2008 10:58 am
brooklyn gal — June 12, 2008 @ 11:00 am
Also, Obama has never said that he thinks it is “OK to unconditionally meet with anti-American foreign leaders.” He believes in diplomacy. McCain should stop twisting words around.
Todd — June 12, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
He’s clearly trying to avoid the “elitist” label.
Victoria — June 12, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
A candidate who hates both beer AND grammar is going to lose a lot of the vote…
Kate — June 12, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
My question: Is it ok to *conditionally* meet with anti-American foreign leaders? “Well…. ok, Mr. Anti-American Leader, I’ll meet with you, but only on these three conditions: 1) Send a black car set to 73 degrees–not 72, not 74, 73–to meet me at the airport. 2) I will eat only orange M&Ms while I’m there; remove all other M&M colors from your candy dishes. 3) Between 2-7 PM, I nap. John McCain does things how he does things.”
As for the random capitalization, unfortunately, I don’t think they teach correct capitalization anymore. Every time I get proposal responses from anyone on the tech staff here at work, I have to fix capitalization. Maybe there’s a rule where you can capitalize every sixth word and that’s fine? If so, I must have been sick from school that day.
Ivan — July 31, 2008 @ 2:11 pm
just to follow up on the outrage over the capitalisation:
the statement is title cased, and title casing can have varying conventions. often, in title casing, articles, such as “a”, “it”, “or”, etc., will be lower cased. see the below new york times headline for an example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hp
that being said, a brief subheadline or regular headline, like “sign up below” would usually appear with “up”, a two letter word, capitalised.
vote nader
Phil — August 4, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
I wonder if the writer realized that the title for this piece is not grammatically correct.
How about: “Grammar in which we can believe”