12-06-2018, 09:52 PM
Donald J. TrumpVerified account @realDonaldTrump
Without the phony Russia Witch Hunt, and with all that we have accomplished in the last almost two years (Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judge’s, Military, Vets, etc.) my approval rating would be at 75% rather than the 50% just reported by Rasmussen. It’s called Presidential Harassment!
7:17 AM - 6 Dec 2018
...a tweet.
Faults of grammar, style, capitalization, and formal logic are his. Pedantic as I am, this horrible prose grates on me. I concede that he rarely makes a spelling error, perhaps because he has learned to use spell-check.
Barack Obama either rarely made such an errant communication or had people making sure that such errant communications went to the shredder. Good writers rely upon other writers to check what they write for blatant errors that could be embarrassing in print. As someone who makes typos because he is not a particularly good typist I need spell-check. Obama apparently had everything that he was going to read on his Teleprompter go through someone with the authority to correct an error. I can say the same of every President who lived into my lifetime, which goes back to Herbert Hoover with FDR skipped.
Dubya had logical gaps when ideology got in the way of common sense, as when he gave us such a stock (or schlock, depending on your taste) phrase that is itself an Orwellian lie -- as in the infamous "Healthy Forests Initiative", another way of saying "no tree left behind (after clear-cutting)". Clear-cutting, I learned in middle school, was appropriate only when land was to be permanently cleared for farmland or such a public-works project as a highway or dam. Other than that, communications from the Bush 43 White House obviously went through someone who would get the capitalization right, excise words that give the impression of slovenly writing, and completely remove something so vulgar as the "grocer's apostrophe"
The grocer's apostrophe? It is right in "grocer's apostrophe" because in that sense the origin is a grocer who uses it as a marker for a plural (which is wrong in English) instead of a possessive in a noun.
Thus
Cigar's 5¢
is the grammatically-hideous grocer's apostrophe, but
Goldwater's Department Store
(yes, the family of Barry Goldwater owned the now-defunct retail business, before the family sold it )
brewer's yeast (yeast used by brewers and bakers) and
----'s Cough Drops (offered for sale, having been originally made by ----- ... I do not give free advertising to anyone, because I expect to be handily paid for any advertising copy should I create it... The plural possessive is typically s', as in ----- Brothers' Cough Drops, which probably are now made by people no longer using the surname -----.
So let me try to edit the tweet:
Were it not for the unfounded attempt to connect this administration to non-existent Russian meddling, what we accomplished in just short of two years (tax cuts, regulatory relief, appointment of conservative judges, and support of both our active military and our veterans), I should have an approval rating of 75% instead of the 50% reported by Rasmussen or the ridiculously-low approval ratings by practically everyone else. Some people fail to appreciate the change that my administration has brought to America.
(I still disbelieve this, as the approval for a successful President who generally evades controversy well when political life is not at all polarized, as with Eisenhower in the 1950s, gets 'only' into the mid-60s. Donald Trump is, to use politically-correct claptrap that I love to mock, "logically challenged". I am an arch-conservative on linguistic conventions who also has no use for statistical folly or any attempt to deceive through rhetorical legerdemain. Truth, unless highly technical, is usually far simpler than obfuscation).
Without the phony Russia Witch Hunt, and with all that we have accomplished in the last almost two years (Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judge’s, Military, Vets, etc.) my approval rating would be at 75% rather than the 50% just reported by Rasmussen. It’s called Presidential Harassment!
7:17 AM - 6 Dec 2018
...a tweet.
Faults of grammar, style, capitalization, and formal logic are his. Pedantic as I am, this horrible prose grates on me. I concede that he rarely makes a spelling error, perhaps because he has learned to use spell-check.
Barack Obama either rarely made such an errant communication or had people making sure that such errant communications went to the shredder. Good writers rely upon other writers to check what they write for blatant errors that could be embarrassing in print. As someone who makes typos because he is not a particularly good typist I need spell-check. Obama apparently had everything that he was going to read on his Teleprompter go through someone with the authority to correct an error. I can say the same of every President who lived into my lifetime, which goes back to Herbert Hoover with FDR skipped.
Dubya had logical gaps when ideology got in the way of common sense, as when he gave us such a stock (or schlock, depending on your taste) phrase that is itself an Orwellian lie -- as in the infamous "Healthy Forests Initiative", another way of saying "no tree left behind (after clear-cutting)". Clear-cutting, I learned in middle school, was appropriate only when land was to be permanently cleared for farmland or such a public-works project as a highway or dam. Other than that, communications from the Bush 43 White House obviously went through someone who would get the capitalization right, excise words that give the impression of slovenly writing, and completely remove something so vulgar as the "grocer's apostrophe"
The grocer's apostrophe? It is right in "grocer's apostrophe" because in that sense the origin is a grocer who uses it as a marker for a plural (which is wrong in English) instead of a possessive in a noun.
Thus
Cigar's 5¢
is the grammatically-hideous grocer's apostrophe, but
Goldwater's Department Store
(yes, the family of Barry Goldwater owned the now-defunct retail business, before the family sold it )
brewer's yeast (yeast used by brewers and bakers) and
----'s Cough Drops (offered for sale, having been originally made by ----- ... I do not give free advertising to anyone, because I expect to be handily paid for any advertising copy should I create it... The plural possessive is typically s', as in ----- Brothers' Cough Drops, which probably are now made by people no longer using the surname -----.
So let me try to edit the tweet:
Quote:Without the phony Russia Witch Hunt, and with all that we have accomplished in the last almost two years (Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judge’s, Military, Vets, etc.) my approval rating would be at 75% rather than the 50% just reported by Rasmussen. It’s called Presidential Harassment!
Were it not for the unfounded attempt to connect this administration to non-existent Russian meddling, what we accomplished in just short of two years (tax cuts, regulatory relief, appointment of conservative judges, and support of both our active military and our veterans), I should have an approval rating of 75% instead of the 50% reported by Rasmussen or the ridiculously-low approval ratings by practically everyone else. Some people fail to appreciate the change that my administration has brought to America.
(I still disbelieve this, as the approval for a successful President who generally evades controversy well when political life is not at all polarized, as with Eisenhower in the 1950s, gets 'only' into the mid-60s. Donald Trump is, to use politically-correct claptrap that I love to mock, "logically challenged". I am an arch-conservative on linguistic conventions who also has no use for statistical folly or any attempt to deceive through rhetorical legerdemain. Truth, unless highly technical, is usually far simpler than obfuscation).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.