CHANGE: Video: ‘We’re no longer the suckers’: Trump to US troops during first visit to combat zone. “First lady Melania Trump joined him on the visit, breaking with precedent of former first lady’s traveling to war zones.” That should be “former first ladies,” but it’s ABC, which apparently laid off its last copy editor for Christmas.

NYT Crossword Editor Gets Beaned By the Roaming Outrage Mob.

YOU CAN’T REASON WITH THE UNREASONABLE:  Meteors and Leftists.

SO NOW THE PRESS IS CALLING ARMED HOME INVADERS “UNWANTED HOUSE VISITORS.”

I can’t do better than this response:

Dead mouse admits lying?

"Projects we need financed": Pittsburghian?  Not necissarily but Ohio Vallian?

Prepositional phrase attachments of the week

“SPONTANEOUS PROTESTS HAVE BEEN PLANNED:”

Syntactic ambiguity of the week

Language Log  Caitlin MacNeil, "Jackson Considers Withdrawing As VA Nominee As New Allegations Surface", TPM 4/26/2018:

Sarah Hoyt on the Politics of Meaningless Words.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON HOW TRUMP TRIGGERS THE MEDIA:

Memorable Quotes

I KNEW TRUMP WAS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT A YEAR AGO, BUT I HAD NO IDEA HE BECAME AN AFRICAN AMERICAN MOM AND VETERAN LAST YEAR TOO, TOO: My take on Trump’s first year as an African-American mom and veteran. Is there anything he can’t do?

Headline from the Los Angeles Times: "South Korea's obsession with speedskating isn't hard to miss."

WELL, THAT’S IRONIC: Automated Cars Are Not Able to Use the Automated Car Wash.

[. ] or [. ]?  I'm a .  guy myself.

I (don't) doubt that the letter is fake

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “The two main objectives in teaching is…”

Pearls Before Swine — “Who’s on first” updated

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! Call them what?

Mouseover title: “The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it’s SEX PORN.”

NBC WENT TOTAL COELO SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Adults are safer eating children than laundry pods, NBC News seems to report.

COURT CASE DEMONSTRATES THE VALUE OF THE OXFORD COMMA:

"Congressional Republicans want to fight on, but the White House says Obamacare repeal is dead", Vox 3/26/2017:

But Mulvaney’s remarks raise a question: If “fixing the system” is a major legislative priority, why is Trump leaving it unfinished? Mulvaney’s answer — that Trump “is not willing to do what other politicians would do” — in that context actually sounds like a damning critique of the president who, it’s worth noting, went on his 13th golf outing since taking office on Sunday.

Sure seems like he's been president longer than that. But anyhow, 13 golf outings since Sunday shows amazing stamina for a man his age.

Kim is anything but happy → Kim is unhappy. Kim is not anything but happy → Kim is happy.  Any attempt to say that Kim is anything but happy is blasphemous →      It's blasphemous to say that Kim is unhappy. Any attempt to say that Kim is not anything but happy is blasphemous →      It's blasphemous to say that Kim is happy.  Any attempt to say that Judge Gorsuch is not anything but overly qualified                                                             is blasphemous. →     It's blasphemous to say that Judge Gorsuch is overly qualified. 

and finally 

An amusing slip in the Daily Mail (online here), in an opinion piece by Dan Hodges on the decline of the Labour Party and its singularly unsuccessful leader Jeremy Corbyn. Hodges says that "anyone who thinks Labour's problems began on September 12, 2015, when Corbyn was elected, are deluding themselves."

It's unquestionably a grammatical mistake, of course. Not about pronoun choice, but about verb agreement.

Grammar is “racist,” proclaims the writing center at the University of Washington, Tacoma. In fact, everything’s racist. Language structure is “unjust.”

In an article called "The increasingly lonely hope of Barack Obama," the The New Yorker showed that it belongs to the increasingly lonely class of educated people who still imagine that if they ever allowed an adjunct to separate infinitival to from the plain-form verb of the infinitival complement that it introduces, demons would break through the walls and floor and drag them down to hell. The article, by Vinson Cunningham, contained this passage:

The President thanked his Vice-President, Joe Biden, and the rest of the people who had made possible his time in office. And here, too, was a contrast with Trump, who has yet to demonstrate an ability ardently and earnestly to praise a person other than himself.

To demonstrate an ability ardently and earnestly? Vinson, are you quite sure you didn't mean that what Trump hasn't yet demonstrated is that he can ardently and earnestly praise a person other than himself?

Some grammar and writing stuff, since I've been subbing in a lot of English classes.

 THIS seems like good news:  In the Wall Street Journal article "Supreme Court Nominee Takes Legal Writing to Next Level," Joe Palazzolo writes that Judge Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, has elevated legal opinions to "a form of wry nonfiction." Not only that, "his affinity for language reveals itself in other ways. Poorly drafted laws tend to summon his inner grammarian."

Jack Maloney found a link to a talk at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute about "Plant Soil Microbiomes in Perineal Agriculture":  Presumably "perineal" in this context is a Cupertino for "perennial". Jack's comment  'Perineal agriculture': not a subject I even want to think about, much less attend a lecture about!

Jonathan O'Connell, "Feds, Trump attorneys wrangle over president’s D.C. hotel lease", Washington Post 2/10/2017 [emphasis added:

Chaffetz told reporters this week that he was interested to learn how officials intended to grapple with the potentially awkward situation in which the Trump-led government intended to negotiate with a business controlled by the president’s family.

“His being both the landlord and the tenant is something that we’re curious what the GSA’s opinion of that is,” Chaffetz said.

Whoever created the sentence, however, it offers a nice example of what linguists call a "resumptive pronoun".