Post's Pen Pans Postcard
My Nashville Post News Alert let me know they had taken a 'fine tooth comb to English First'. I got my hopes up...but that's not what they did at all with the petition postcard. Following in the 'make fun of it' instead of actually examine and argue it camp they critique the grammar and punctuation on the plea for signature side but didn't bother to do half as in depth an examination of the actual amendment. They didn't mention that side at all.
This is another example of what I wrote about this morning. How does this actually move the discussion forward? It doesn't. I expected the Post to turn the postcard over and dissect the amendment itself instead of wasting time and pixels on playing around. Here's the text of the amendment again. Maybe this weekend they'll have some time to give the other side of this card equal treatment. I've got plenty of red pens here if they need them.The undersigned residents and qualified voters of Davidson County, Tennessee, do hereby propose the following amendment to the Metropolitan charter to be voted on by the people at the November 4, 2008 election. A new section numbered 1.08 will be added to Article 1 of the Metropolitan Charter. The new section shall state the following: "English is the official language of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee. Official actions (those which bind or commit the government) shall be taken only in the English language, and all official government communications and publications shall be published only in English. No person shall have a right to government services in any other language. All meetings of the Metro Council, boards, and Commissions of the Metropolitan government shall be conducted in English. Nothing in this measure shall be interpreted to conflict with federal or state law." Voters shall be provided the two choices of FOR and AGAINST.
2 comments:
Kay,
You might be interested in my post about the Post.
http://modestmeliorism.blogspot.com/2008/06/ad-hominem-local-edition.html
Best,
Chad
I'm against the referendum, and wouldn't be opposed to critiquing the grammar, but they're stretching their edits. First, the "83% needs a plural verb" comment- the subject of the clause is "one" not 83%, an object of a preposition. "One...who believes" is correct. Also, the hyphen in "county-wide" is appropriate since the two words together modify the noun "referendum." One could argue it doesn't have to be there since it's not ambiguous, but putting it there is not a mistake. The rest of the suggestions are really stylistic more than grammatical.
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