Barred (abbreviated) form of "The". The. Use it. Love it. The is there for you.
Earlier this week the Democrats in the House gathered in support of the re authorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Now, I'm completely unfamiliar with the statute and have no opinion on it. I'm against violence upon women. Heck, I'm against violence against men. I'm against violence. I want to be clear on that. That's not what this post is about.
The Democrats had a purple sign they appeared with which stated:
REAUTHORIZE
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT
Just like that.
Think about that. That actually states "Reauthorize violence against women act".
If I apply the conventional rules of English, that means that we are standing there in front of a sign urging us to pass an act which reauthorizes violence against women.
There's a need for a determiner, or the definate article the way I learned it shortly after English was invented, in there.
A determiner is this type of word, according to the online Oxford dictionary:
Determiner
In other words, the sign needs the world "the" in there. As in:
REAUTHORIZE THE
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT
Am I being pedantic? Well perhaps, but I expect the nation's leaders to be able to speak the freakin' language.
Words matter and using them is important. I can't even say using them correctly matters here, as they simply didn't use the definite article. They needed to. They had plenty of space on their sign.
Indeed, that leads to the current trend of members of Congress appearing behind signs in general, which suggest such a lack of oral capacity that they have to reduce their messages to simple signs. That's not good.
But omitting the definite article when you do? That's even worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment