More mangled English from Donald Trump. He stated that he is irreparably broken and cannot be fixed. We don;t know if he knows he said that or not. It could be more disingenuousness. With language, if you are knowingly sloppy, you can later say, "that's not what I said" when the grammar errors are overlooked for a supposed intended meaning."No one can fix things like me."He can be repaired by no one.
We might assume that he meant, "No one can fix things like I do;" however, in the public eye and in a leadership position, we need to be clear.
Oh wait, what am I talking about? Trump supporters don't care what he does: he's the big yellow bomb that will put an end to the GOP and then hopefully the obstructionism in which the Republicans have been been wallowing and fermenting for the last 50 years (maybe more: I haven't seen it)
For the sake of those who will be real leaders, the way to keep control of these #subject-objectpronouns is to avoid elliptical construction until you have control of the full expression. Elliptical means with some words left out. (as "..." is called an ellipsis). In other words, when saying something like, "No one understands him like me," think about what you are saying, what you are really saying, what you mean to say?
The meaning of this sentence is that noone understands that male person like they understand you. Is that the intended meaning?
Many people use this incorrect form and many people assume that "like me" means "I do;" it doesn't. Legally, words mean what they say, not what the speaker thinks they mean. It's smart express yourself correctly and know that you are doing so, and it's easier than one might think, given the mangled English of the media.
How is this easy? Avoid elliptical construction until you have control over them. Here are more examples:
"She likes him more than me."
vs.
"She likes him more than I."
Both are correct and mean two different things. Put the verb back in: "She likes him more than I do." "She likes him more than [she likes] me."
I, you, He, She, It, They are all subject pronouns
Me, you, him, her, it, them are all object pronouns.
. . . and just as graciously as the boy who amended what had been the correct spelling of potato to the incorrect "potatoe" for the VP Dan Quayle (when, in order not to embarrass the VP, the [6th grade?] boy allowed the VP to "correct" his spelling), Ms Lauper corrected herself to say ". . . badly," after the Donald on an April 2010 "Celebrity Apprentice" stopped her midsentence to advise her to use the adverb badly to modify the sensory verb feel,
so on 20 April 2010, Big Red made an appearance on AliMcJ's Dolls on blogspot, on behalf of the Grammar Police in support of Ms. Lauper, to say,
". . . so my dears, the lovely Ms. Lauper, in the Celebrity Apprentice boardroom, said 'I felt bad . . . ' about one or another event that affected people personally in that day's task. Without letting her finish, the Donald said, 'Badly. You felt badly.'
"'Mmmmm. Badly,' she said and continued, knowing well that her capacity for feeling is not in the least stunted, ill, or faulty, as the adverb badly suggests. One can see badly, if one's vision is bad. One can smell bad or badly, and they mean two different things.
. . . and so today, I, Big Red of the International Grammar police, have come to induct the Donald into the Hall of Fame at the Nathan Detroit School of Grammar." (20 May 2010: he's a Hall of Famer)
Great Googamooga, Trump speaks in Orwellian monosyllabic hyperbole; the least he could do is know how to use bad and badly well, or more simply, know how to use bad and badly correctly.
I repeat this key exchange today, 21 May 2016, as an example of how very protected the ignorance of Donald Trump is. Like Ms. Lauper, most people find it's simply easier to ignore him than to help him. His advisors will be dropping one by one (as he fires them or no longer holds them hostage) with statements reflecting the same experience: too much trouble. He has learned nothing: giving his music teacher in the second grade a black eye because the Donald felt (and admittedly as you see here, he is not good at feeling, as he feels badly) that he, the second-grader from the Bronx and Queensknew more about music than the teacher. That is the key to the Donald. He grows more ignorant daily: fewer people are inclined to deal with him in a helpful way because it's easier to ignore him than to teach him: he has spent his life this way.
The Underground Railroad, continued
March is women's history month, so Larry Willmore's Grace Parra went out on the street to ask people if they knew anything about Harriet Tubman, and what they knew. Almost nothing.
One young man came close: he thought she had something to do with establishing one of the railroads.
Do I need a sobbing emoticon?
Asleep in the Deep?
Porsha [sic] Williams, granddaughter of civil rights figure Josea Williams, touring historic places of interest in the South with the Atlanta Housewives, looked at breathing holes drilled in the floor of a southern church which had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and expressed great concern that the conductor didn't have a place to sit and kept asking where the tracks were. This is not a little girl: she's a big one, graduated from a local southern university, and proud to say she is the granddaughter of a civil rights leader.
She also thought that going to the Million Man March would be a good place to troll for men and dressed accordingly: her assets are visible and expressed the overwhelmingly nonstop influence of something irritating to her as being "265 days a year."
Recently, she and her friend? sister? were chastised by a business manager for being "as dumb as paper cups." They giggled, then flipped their hair weaves and glossed their lips.
This might give me the best venue to collect the English as Butchered by Talking Heads and Reality Show Personalities into a cohesive arrangement to help people who really do want to express themselves clearly, hopefully by way of humorous examples of how poor habits can wind up in impossible constructions of unintended meanings. It's pointless to say this because each post goes to the bottom, so an introduction is moot -ish.
In addition to mangled English or poorly understood construction, of note is "History According to Real Housewives, Specifically those of Atlanta." Porsha [sic] Williams, the granddaughter of civil rights figure Josea Williams, on seeing breathing holes drilled in the floor of a southern church which was a stop on the Underground Railroad, expressed great concern that the conductor didn't have a place to sit. This is not a little girl: she's a big one, graduated from a local black university, and proud to say she is the granddaughter of a civil rights leader. One of the ladies, an entertainment attorney, said, gently, "It's not a real train, honey. Oh dear. Oh dear."
Recently, Cynthia Bailey of the Cynthia Bailey modelling agency and BravoTV's "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" was given tickets to see "Race" and asked to comment on it. Her take was that Jesse Owens "won the race in spite of his race." In spite of his race? Oh my. No, in the face of Adolph Hitler and the (1932?) Munich Olympics in which The Master Race was to dominate. Jesse Owens in spite of and in the face of the Nazi party's beliefs in a light-skinned Master Race "won the race;" he won the race in spite of the danger he might have been in by winning, as a black person, in the belly of the beast into which the Nazi party would turn Germany in the coming years. The words "he won in spite of his race" holds a tacit agreement to an inferior position. It shaky syntax. Perhaps she meant to say that Jesse Owens stood up to the man who believed in a Master Race and the natural inferiority of darker races and proved him wrong in front of the world; he went to the Olympics knowing what hostility he would be facing as a black athlete, and in spite of the openly expressed beliefs of the host country about the inferiority of non-Aryan races, Jesse Owens took the gold medal in track: a national embarrassment for the Nazi party, and he stood alone, facing down Hitler. If anything, Jesse Owens, like many of the black athletes dominating sports in the US, won not in spite of his race, but because of it, in spite of the hate-filled rhetoric that fearful little men who become dictators, such as Adolph Hitler, believe and spew.
