{"id":63,"date":"2012-10-21T23:53:07","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T07:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/?p=63"},"modified":"2012-10-21T23:53:07","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T07:53:07","slug":"incorrect-use-of-pronoun-leads-to-geographical-blunder-by-joe-biden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/incorrect-use-of-pronoun-leads-to-geographical-blunder-by-joe-biden\/","title":{"rendered":"Incorrect use of pronoun leads to geographical blunder by Joe Biden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Say it ain’t so, Uncle Joe! There was a moment during the October 11 VP Debate where a comparison between Libya and Syria came up. A question was posed to Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Moderator: “So why doesn’t the same logic apply in Syria?”<\/p>\n

Joe Biden: “It\u2019s a different country. It is five times as large geographically.”<\/p>\n

Any listener worth their English assumed Joe was referring to “Syria” when he said “it”. I did, and apparently I wasn’t alone. This blogger<\/a> faced similar confusion and promptly wrote an excellent blog post about it.<\/p>\n

Pronouns can be a tricky gamble. Just ask Paul Ryan<\/a>. If you can avoid pronouns and reader confusion in the process, staunch English teachers will tell you to the always use a proper noun.<\/p>\n

The rule with pronouns<\/h3>\n

When you have two nouns in the same sentence, the pronoun refers to the last noun used. When you have only one noun in a sentence, as in the Moderator’s question, the pronoun ALWAYS refers to the single noun used. In the case of the Moderator’s question, the only noun is Syria.<\/p>\n

While Biden meant to refer to Libya, the English-educated political fact checkers should have caught Joe’s geographical blunder; Syria is not five times larger than Libya. It’s the other way around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Say it ain’t so, Uncle Joe! There was a moment during the October 11 VP Debate where a comparison between Libya and Syria came up. A question was posed to Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Moderator: “So why doesn’t the same logic apply in Syria?”<\/p>\n

Joe Biden: “It\u2019s a different country. It is five times as large geographically.”<\/p>\n

Any listener worth their English assumed Joe was\u00a0[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2DkBj-11","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gramlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}