WTF?
There are some mistakes that grammar alone can’t fix. They aren’t simply misusing a word, or faulty syntax, or bad punctuation, but the result of something else entirely: sloppy thinking. Some writers – and we’re all writer’s now, aren’t we? – rush their thoughts onto paper, obeying the rules of grammar precisely but without giving a second thought to what in fact they actually wrote.
The great editor and grammar snob Theodore Bernstein classified these errors with a simple interjection: “Eh?”. You’ve probably come across a meme or post that makes you pause and say “Wait a second. What?”. That confusion is a typical reaction: cloudy, emotional thinking causes writers to say exactly what they don’t mean, and when they’re trying to be clever or snarky they contrive sentences that are indeed clever and snarky jokes – that come at his expense.
Here’s an example I came across on the Other 98% group on Facebook. The meme says: “Isn’t it interesting that Trump has never ‘mistakenly’ retweeted anyone advocating for equal rights?”. Before I break it down, I want to point out that this has nothing to do with politics, only writing.
The context to this attack, which I suppose is an attack although it really isn’t – as will become obvious – is vague, which is never a good sign. That Trump apparently tweeted something objectionable comes as no surprise; he tweets objectionable things so often, indeed, that inferring which out of the millions of tweets it could be attacking would be a laborious task that the author shouldn’t have put the burden of on his audience. I suppose, however, it must be something recent, so I did a quick Google search of “Trump mistakenly tweeted” and even with such a supposedly narrow focus, several pages resulted that displayed everything from “Trump mistakenly tweets Sri Lanka bombing” to “Trump accidently tweeted an insult at a pastor”. So I have no idea what specific accidental tweet this meme is referring to, but it matters not.
The meme is stupid regardless.
So let’s break this down, shall we? The first oddity is the single marked quotations. Usually, when quoting someone, we use the standard double quotation marks that everyone knows. It’s so common and well-known that using the single marks immediately draw attention and make you think the author is using them for a specific reason. The only purpose, I know of, that single mark quotations serve is to quote someone within a quote. “Bob is an asshat and never tells the truth. ‘I’m having Corn Nuts’ for dinner, he said. He didn’t though, son of a bitch.” But the meme itself isn’t a quotation from another source, and why should it be, considering the meme could simply be written and attributed to the original person who wrote it.
The single mark quotations must therefore be a mistake, and a rather sloppy one. We all make typos here and there in the heat of a discussion, but those are merely mistakes in comments, not published memes we should expect were at least proofread sufficiently to catch a mistake of this gravity. I’m not going to spend too much time on the quotation mistake because that would be petty, and there’s plenty else going on here worse than that. I just want to point out that the quotation marks set off a flare that startles you into the suspicion that this writer doesn’t know what he’s about.
And that makes you take a second look.
The meme, in short, says exactly what it doesn’t want to. What it wants to say is that it’s interesting that Trump has never retweeted anyone advocating for equal rights. Whether Trump has or hasn’t, and what the author exactly means “equal” – my bad, ‘equal rights’ are in this day and age is anyone’s guess. Normally I understand, if somewhat vaguely, what equal rights are, but in this case I’m not so sure given the author's credibility. (If they don't understand how to use quotation marks, just what do they mean by equal rights?) It would be somewhat rather interesting that Trump hasn’t retweeted an equal right’s advocate, if he had occasion to among his barrage of mistaken tweets about everything else. But it it’s far more interesting that he hasn’t ‘mistakenly’ retweeted a human rights advocate.
Whatever heinous thing it was that Trump retweeted, he must have mistakenly retweeted it, or it wouldn’t – would it! – have been a goddamned mistake. If Trump mistakenly retweeted an equal right’s advocate, that means that he retweeted something he doesn’t agree with, and that would therefore mean Trump doesn’t support equal rights. So to snarkily say that it’s “interesting” he hasn’t done this can only mean that Trump is such an ardent supporter of equal rights that he has never – not once – retweeted an equal rights advocate when he meant to post something hateful instead.
Of course, there is the possibility that Trump could have meant to say something foul and odious about equal rights and retweeted something he thought was such. That is indeed an interesting thing, but the coincidence of an equal rights advocate saying something that Trump thought was foul but wasn’t is so remote that it’s equivalent to saying “Isn’t it interesting that velociraptors don’t domesticate dolphins and use them as 'sex dolls'?” When you consider what this ham-handed meme is trying to say, that would mean that Trump intended to tweet something against equal rights, but tweeted support instead, and then said it was a mistake, which according to the meme he has never done. This means that he only tweets mistakes when they are in opposition to equal rights, which would be the original tweet that Trump mistakenly tweeted, not the bizarre obverse that he means to tweet something hateful by quoting an equal rights advocate but did so mistakenly. What would an equal rights advocate, supposing Trump would be aware of him and follow his tweets, even say that Trump, hateful fiend the author thinks he is, would think was against equal rights? Trump makes mistakes with his tweets – that is obvious – but to quote an equal rights advocate who said anything that by the most wild flight of fancy could be interpreted as hateful, and that Trump of all people would find it and clap and retweet it, only to realize that it actually supported human rights after all and then have the honesty to call it a mistake instead of doubling down, as he almost always does -- that, my lovelies, is as likely as a turd turning back into the Snicker’s bar from whence it came.
So yes, among the horrible things that Trump may or may not be guilty of, retweeting an equal rights advocate for the purpose of condemning human rights is not one of them. Interesting, yes – but not exactly something one should be proud enough for noticing to announce to the world.
But the rabbit hole goes further, my lovelies.
Let’s return to those faulty quotation marks. If the author really meant to use full quotations, and meant them ironically, that only makes the statement worse. That means Trump never ironically retweeted a human rights tweet and then took it back as if saying “Psyche bitches!” It is, actually, pretty interesting he’s never gotten that idea in his head and done it. The meme could be suggesting that its interesting that Trump never retweeted an equal rights advocate and then called it a 'mistake', as he has apparently done with something else, but if he did -- as the meme implies -- brashly tweet something awful and then say it was a mistake, the logic doesn't carry over into tweeting something good and saying that was a mistake. It would be interesting if Trump retweeted an equal rights tweet and came under such heavy fire that he called it a mistake, the fire presumably coming from his supporters who hate presumably hate equal rights. That such a bizarre thing has not happened is interesting, but only interesting because it implies that Trump is a secret supporters of equal rights, because otherwise why would he retweet an equal rights tweet in earnest -- as he apparently did with the bad tweet -- and then take it back in the same way he took the bad one back unless he supported equal rights?
But let’s entertain momentarily that that there was an equal rights advocate somewhere on this green Earth that tweeted something awful. Suppose he was having a bad day and decided, despite his long career of fighting for the oppressed, to throw an entire group under the bus just for the hell of it. Stranger things have happened. Let’s say that there’s a possibility that Trump could have retweeted this awful thing and then realized that he had retweeted something hateful. At worst, Trump in that case would merely be lazy or absent-minded, thinking he needed a Gandhi tweet to bolster support and just so happened to mistakenly retweet the one bigoted tweet of the billion that weren’t. But Trump has interestingly never done this.
Even given this highly unlikely scenario, the meme is still involuntarily complimenting Trump as a meticulous tweeter who never assumes that just because Gandhi is Gandhi he never tweets anything bad. There’s no way to interpret this meme in a light that isn’t complimentary to Trump, and since it’s sitting right there on one of the most progressive groups on Facebook like a sore turd I have no choice but to assume the author and the ten million people who liked and loved it were too dense to see that.
The problem ultimately lies in the negation of a negative. Trump retweeted something bad, and then apparently said it was a mistake. The inverse – accidently tweeting something good and taking that back – can’t be expressed by negating the negation of a negative, which leaves a negative after two cancel each other out. That amounts to "Isn’t it interesting that Trump never retweets equal rights advocates”, which isn’t logically equivalent to him mistakenly tweeting them, which is what the meme thinks is interesting but doesn’t think too much about. The author wants to criticize Trump for not retweeting equal rights advocates, which is one thing, but also for retweeting something bad by either a sincere or an insincere mistake, which is another, but tries to attack him for both by using one against the other. That results in an eating-one's-cake-and-having-it-too fallacy. By using Trump's mistaken bad tweet as an attack for his lack of mistaken positive tweets, the author is trying to make Trump two distinct things that he can't be simultaneously. He can't be both so incompetent, or so insincere, that he mistakenly or 'mistakenly' tweets something bad, and also so competent in his evil that he never mistakenly tweets anything good.
The author thought he was being clever, but alas – such is not so.
So until they take it down, the Other 98% currently has the most complimentary meme about Trump and his dastardly tweets on the internet. And they don’t even know it.
There are some mistakes that grammar alone can’t fix. They aren’t simply misusing a word, or faulty syntax, or bad punctuation, but the result of something else entirely: sloppy thinking. Some writers – and we’re all writer’s now, aren’t we? – rush their thoughts onto paper, obeying the rules of grammar precisely but without giving a second thought to what in fact they actually wrote.
The great editor and grammar snob Theodore Bernstein classified these errors with a simple interjection: “Eh?”. You’ve probably come across a meme or post that makes you pause and say “Wait a second. What?”. That confusion is a typical reaction: cloudy, emotional thinking causes writers to say exactly what they don’t mean, and when they’re trying to be clever or snarky they contrive sentences that are indeed clever and snarky jokes – that come at his expense.
Here’s an example I came across on the Other 98% group on Facebook. The meme says: “Isn’t it interesting that Trump has never ‘mistakenly’ retweeted anyone advocating for equal rights?”. Before I break it down, I want to point out that this has nothing to do with politics, only writing.
The context to this attack, which I suppose is an attack although it really isn’t – as will become obvious – is vague, which is never a good sign. That Trump apparently tweeted something objectionable comes as no surprise; he tweets objectionable things so often, indeed, that inferring which out of the millions of tweets it could be attacking would be a laborious task that the author shouldn’t have put the burden of on his audience. I suppose, however, it must be something recent, so I did a quick Google search of “Trump mistakenly tweeted” and even with such a supposedly narrow focus, several pages resulted that displayed everything from “Trump mistakenly tweets Sri Lanka bombing” to “Trump accidently tweeted an insult at a pastor”. So I have no idea what specific accidental tweet this meme is referring to, but it matters not.
The meme is stupid regardless.
So let’s break this down, shall we? The first oddity is the single marked quotations. Usually, when quoting someone, we use the standard double quotation marks that everyone knows. It’s so common and well-known that using the single marks immediately draw attention and make you think the author is using them for a specific reason. The only purpose, I know of, that single mark quotations serve is to quote someone within a quote. “Bob is an asshat and never tells the truth. ‘I’m having Corn Nuts’ for dinner, he said. He didn’t though, son of a bitch.” But the meme itself isn’t a quotation from another source, and why should it be, considering the meme could simply be written and attributed to the original person who wrote it.
The single mark quotations must therefore be a mistake, and a rather sloppy one. We all make typos here and there in the heat of a discussion, but those are merely mistakes in comments, not published memes we should expect were at least proofread sufficiently to catch a mistake of this gravity. I’m not going to spend too much time on the quotation mistake because that would be petty, and there’s plenty else going on here worse than that. I just want to point out that the quotation marks set off a flare that startles you into the suspicion that this writer doesn’t know what he’s about.
And that makes you take a second look.
The meme, in short, says exactly what it doesn’t want to. What it wants to say is that it’s interesting that Trump has never retweeted anyone advocating for equal rights. Whether Trump has or hasn’t, and what the author exactly means “equal” – my bad, ‘equal rights’ are in this day and age is anyone’s guess. Normally I understand, if somewhat vaguely, what equal rights are, but in this case I’m not so sure given the author's credibility. (If they don't understand how to use quotation marks, just what do they mean by equal rights?) It would be somewhat rather interesting that Trump hasn’t retweeted an equal right’s advocate, if he had occasion to among his barrage of mistaken tweets about everything else. But it it’s far more interesting that he hasn’t ‘mistakenly’ retweeted a human rights advocate.
Whatever heinous thing it was that Trump retweeted, he must have mistakenly retweeted it, or it wouldn’t – would it! – have been a goddamned mistake. If Trump mistakenly retweeted an equal right’s advocate, that means that he retweeted something he doesn’t agree with, and that would therefore mean Trump doesn’t support equal rights. So to snarkily say that it’s “interesting” he hasn’t done this can only mean that Trump is such an ardent supporter of equal rights that he has never – not once – retweeted an equal rights advocate when he meant to post something hateful instead.
Of course, there is the possibility that Trump could have meant to say something foul and odious about equal rights and retweeted something he thought was such. That is indeed an interesting thing, but the coincidence of an equal rights advocate saying something that Trump thought was foul but wasn’t is so remote that it’s equivalent to saying “Isn’t it interesting that velociraptors don’t domesticate dolphins and use them as 'sex dolls'?” When you consider what this ham-handed meme is trying to say, that would mean that Trump intended to tweet something against equal rights, but tweeted support instead, and then said it was a mistake, which according to the meme he has never done. This means that he only tweets mistakes when they are in opposition to equal rights, which would be the original tweet that Trump mistakenly tweeted, not the bizarre obverse that he means to tweet something hateful by quoting an equal rights advocate but did so mistakenly. What would an equal rights advocate, supposing Trump would be aware of him and follow his tweets, even say that Trump, hateful fiend the author thinks he is, would think was against equal rights? Trump makes mistakes with his tweets – that is obvious – but to quote an equal rights advocate who said anything that by the most wild flight of fancy could be interpreted as hateful, and that Trump of all people would find it and clap and retweet it, only to realize that it actually supported human rights after all and then have the honesty to call it a mistake instead of doubling down, as he almost always does -- that, my lovelies, is as likely as a turd turning back into the Snicker’s bar from whence it came.
So yes, among the horrible things that Trump may or may not be guilty of, retweeting an equal rights advocate for the purpose of condemning human rights is not one of them. Interesting, yes – but not exactly something one should be proud enough for noticing to announce to the world.
But the rabbit hole goes further, my lovelies.
Let’s return to those faulty quotation marks. If the author really meant to use full quotations, and meant them ironically, that only makes the statement worse. That means Trump never ironically retweeted a human rights tweet and then took it back as if saying “Psyche bitches!” It is, actually, pretty interesting he’s never gotten that idea in his head and done it. The meme could be suggesting that its interesting that Trump never retweeted an equal rights advocate and then called it a 'mistake', as he has apparently done with something else, but if he did -- as the meme implies -- brashly tweet something awful and then say it was a mistake, the logic doesn't carry over into tweeting something good and saying that was a mistake. It would be interesting if Trump retweeted an equal rights tweet and came under such heavy fire that he called it a mistake, the fire presumably coming from his supporters who hate presumably hate equal rights. That such a bizarre thing has not happened is interesting, but only interesting because it implies that Trump is a secret supporters of equal rights, because otherwise why would he retweet an equal rights tweet in earnest -- as he apparently did with the bad tweet -- and then take it back in the same way he took the bad one back unless he supported equal rights?
But let’s entertain momentarily that that there was an equal rights advocate somewhere on this green Earth that tweeted something awful. Suppose he was having a bad day and decided, despite his long career of fighting for the oppressed, to throw an entire group under the bus just for the hell of it. Stranger things have happened. Let’s say that there’s a possibility that Trump could have retweeted this awful thing and then realized that he had retweeted something hateful. At worst, Trump in that case would merely be lazy or absent-minded, thinking he needed a Gandhi tweet to bolster support and just so happened to mistakenly retweet the one bigoted tweet of the billion that weren’t. But Trump has interestingly never done this.
Even given this highly unlikely scenario, the meme is still involuntarily complimenting Trump as a meticulous tweeter who never assumes that just because Gandhi is Gandhi he never tweets anything bad. There’s no way to interpret this meme in a light that isn’t complimentary to Trump, and since it’s sitting right there on one of the most progressive groups on Facebook like a sore turd I have no choice but to assume the author and the ten million people who liked and loved it were too dense to see that.
The problem ultimately lies in the negation of a negative. Trump retweeted something bad, and then apparently said it was a mistake. The inverse – accidently tweeting something good and taking that back – can’t be expressed by negating the negation of a negative, which leaves a negative after two cancel each other out. That amounts to "Isn’t it interesting that Trump never retweets equal rights advocates”, which isn’t logically equivalent to him mistakenly tweeting them, which is what the meme thinks is interesting but doesn’t think too much about. The author wants to criticize Trump for not retweeting equal rights advocates, which is one thing, but also for retweeting something bad by either a sincere or an insincere mistake, which is another, but tries to attack him for both by using one against the other. That results in an eating-one's-cake-and-having-it-too fallacy. By using Trump's mistaken bad tweet as an attack for his lack of mistaken positive tweets, the author is trying to make Trump two distinct things that he can't be simultaneously. He can't be both so incompetent, or so insincere, that he mistakenly or 'mistakenly' tweets something bad, and also so competent in his evil that he never mistakenly tweets anything good.
The author thought he was being clever, but alas – such is not so.
So until they take it down, the Other 98% currently has the most complimentary meme about Trump and his dastardly tweets on the internet. And they don’t even know it.