Our bureacrats is not learning
10:50 AM Boston
WBUR/NPR’s On Point is spending the whole hour with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Education not one of my big issues, I’m not listening that hard.
But my sensitive ears perked right up when Secretary Duncan made my least favorite grammar error!
He said “my parents instilled (some valuable character trait or other, I was distracted by my anguish and forgot) in my brothers and sisters and I.“ The end is near, brothers and sisters.
It made me go back (and how easy it was, thanks to good search!) to the wonderful article in Harper’s April 2001 by David Foster Wallace called Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage (requires a Harper’s subscription to see the whole page – I say buy one it’s a good magazine, you won’t regret it, if you must have it for free google the full title). In the article he proclaims himself a “SNOOT,” the term used in his family for what others call Grammar Nazis. In my family, we just called them our friends.
If you’ve ever been tempted to understand what drives people like us, or conversely want a funny, interesting reasonable-length thing to read so you can say you’ve read something by David Foster Wallace, check out the article.
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