Strange bedfellows
Now, that’s something. It’s one thing for the Cheneys to talk about gay issues at a campaign stop–everyone knows their daughter is a lesbian, even if they don’t make a big deal out of it. But Cheney’s apparently going to appear in an HRC ad:
The ad will air next week during the convention in New York media.
It features portions of Cheney’s remarks on gay marriage and ends with an announcer saying “He spoke from the heart for millions of parents. Discrimination is wrong. What if it was your child, Mr. President?”
There’s a link to the ad in Windows Media format (which I can’t get to work, even when I open it in IE instead of Firefox). This is weird timing, to say the least. It makes me wonder whether those people who’ve been suggesting that Cheney will be gently pushed aside for another nominee are on to something.
PS: Couldn’t they get some gay guy who works in education or publishing to proofread that final, climactic, and errant use of the counterfactual? Sheesh.
The subjunctive is dying in English. Makes me wonder what will go next: person or number?
I suspect the ad *looks* worse than it is because the subjunctive is still alive in writing (and the error should have been caught at the script stage) but in speech such errors go largely unnoticed. I’ve never heard anyone orally correct someone else’s lack of a subjunctive.
“I suspect the ad *looks* worse than it is”
That is, worse than it will sound when aired on TV. One can get away with a lot of errors in speech that are glaringly wrong on paper (or online).
IOW, I started learning Japanese just before English takes on some of its characteristics we now find most difficult. It figures.