Sunday, September 9, 2007

Bad Grammar from the Associated Press

In a story filed by Ron Fournier from Nashua, NH:
(Nashua, N.H.) — In a raw populist appeal, Democrat John Edwards on Saturday accused presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton of defending a lobbyist-driven political system that is "rigged against regular Americans" and killed her plan for universal health care.
A classic case of the worst error in grammar: a lack of agreement between subject and verb. Who or what "killed her plan"? Was it John Edwards? Or was it a lobbyist-drivien political system? There is no logical way to tell. Human intuition would probably lead to the former, which is a person and not an abstraction, as the subject of the last verb. But the difficultly could easily be remedied by placing a comma before the word "and."

It's hard to understand why so many people these days are allergic to punctuation.

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