Grammatical error of the week

« previous post | next post »

According to the 2016 Texas Republican Party platform (or more exactly, the "Report of the Permanent Committee on Platform and Resolutions as Amended and Adopted by the 2016 State Convention of the Republican Party of Texas"),

Homosexuality is a chosen behavior […] that has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

Restoring the elided material:

Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

Structures of the form [[N that S] that S], where the second relative clause modifies the initial noun, are awkward but not uncommon. And in this case, the awkward structure is forced by  the plural noun truths and the singular auxiliary verb has. Plus the opportunity to mock mean and small-minded people.

Interestingly, the 2014 Texas Republican platform doesn't have this problem:

The corresponding clause from the 2016 platform:

This is not the first time that the anti-homosexual agenda in Texas has run into grammatical problems:

"Is marriage similar or identical to itself?", 11/2/2005
"Does marriage exist in Texas?", 11/19/2009



12 Comments

  1. mollymooly said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 5:47 am

    The funny reading is also ungrammatical; for the required nesting of attributes it ought to be something like

    Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths and that has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

    or

    Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths, that has been ordained by God in the Bible, that was recognized by our nations founders, and that is shared by the majority of Texans.

    or, at a minimum, adding a comma (or maybe a semicolon?)

    Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths,[← here] that has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

    Also: nation's 2014 → nations 2016. Looks like somebody retyped instead of copy-pasting.

  2. D.O. said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 11:17 am

    The whole thing is weird on semantic level too. How behavior can be contrary to the truths? For this to work truths has to have a meaning of principles, laws, orders or some such. I am not sure that there is such a meaning at least outside very specific religious contexts (and probably not even there).

  3. Matt said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 12:11 pm

    D.O: while that meaning is predominant (and indeed within a theological discussion the primary) meaning of "truth" in a Christian context, the one example that comes to mind is much more secular:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  4. D.O. said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 2:15 pm

    Yes, Matt, I think you are right about the Declaration of Independence. Still, is anybody talking about stealing or lust as against "truths"?

  5. Matt said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 4:29 pm

    Well, slavery (or at least taxation without representation if we're limiting ourselves to the mindset of the one making the utterance – which, of course, they'd equate with stealing) was certainly perceived to be against the truth of equal creation and unalienable rights.

  6. Guy said,

    May 21, 2016 @ 4:32 pm

    @D.O.

    I don't think the problem is an unusual sense of "truth", but simply muddled thinking in the first place, thinking that it makes sense to describe behavior that actually occurs as contrary to facts. I think this is like how people sometimes attempt to assign truth values to other things that lack propositional content. But I may be excessively uncharitable in appraising the cognitive capabilities (or lack thereof) of people who hold the views espoused by that plank.

  7. Tom said,

    May 22, 2016 @ 11:32 am

    It's much more likely for a court to rule a statute unconstitutional if the judges believe the statute is objectively foolish. A good example is Griswold v. Connecticut, involving a widely-derided law banning physicians from giving contraceptive advice, even to married couples. (Some, like the late Justice Scalia, deride this tendency to use the Constitution to strike down legislative twaddle, saying the Constitution offers no protection against jackleg legislatures and gives the courts no power to correct their folly.)

    I wonder if foolish, clumsy grammar similarly influences the reader's perception of the merits of the assertion, perhaps even subconsciously. Might the reader be pushed by bad grammar to oppose the writer substantively, even if the reader isn't a grammar wonk? Or, if the reader agrees with the writer, will that blind him to lapses in style?

  8. Charles said,

    May 22, 2016 @ 12:10 pm

    I think that we should pay more attention to differences between 18th and 19th century and contemporary punctuation than it seems to me that we do. In the passage quoted above from the Declaration of Independence, a colon might've served better as the first punctuation–by modern standards. Likewise, there is a comma in the second amendment that contributes to an ambiguous reading of that 18th century passage. To one who has studied Locke, Hume and Berkeley, differences in "correct" punctuation can cause frustration, amusement or downright bewilderment. Whether the punctuation is right or wrong is not at issue; but we should exert ourselves to understand how differences in punctuation in specific works and passages can influence our understanding of their substance.

    In the case of diction, grammar, syntax, or usage quality, I can say that I'm influenced by it. I know that I'm influenced by it and try to be attentive to that bias. In this particular case, the failure of the verb to agree with the subject is funny, especially as it's a correction of the previous platform statement.

  9. Lupus753 said,

    May 22, 2016 @ 7:09 pm

    The link up at the top leads to a 404 page.

  10. Francois Lang said,

    May 23, 2016 @ 7:37 am

    @ Lupus753: The text of the report can be found at

    https://www.texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PERM-PLATFORM.pdf

  11. Eneri Rose said,

    May 23, 2016 @ 8:51 am

    I'm perplexed by the comma preceding "in public policy" in the second sentence of the text.

  12. Fritz Keppler said,

    May 26, 2016 @ 1:17 pm

    The triumph of home schooling.

RSS feed for comments on this post