The internet as teaching tool
I have seen the coverage of Sotomayor’s malapropisms – eminent vs imminent, story of knowledge instead of store of knowledge, province vs providence…
I was thinking this pointed to not much substantive. So she makes mistakes when she speaks. We all do. But if these are in written briefs and opinions, then there is no excuse – that’s what a proofreader, editor, spell check is for. She’s supposed to be a professional. For a woman in her position there really is no acceptable excuse for repeated mistakes of this kind.
You don’t get to make this claim:
Sotomayor herself is famously a stickler for proper usage in lawyer’s briefs, once writing, “each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.”
if you can’t hold yourself to the same standard.
And if she’d only spent some time online in an MMO or a chat room where she was tempted to trot out the grammar police flashing light and then made an error of her own later? Whoo. She’d likely be taken down a notch or two. Those people are vicious. It’s a nasty, cut-throat world out there for self-appointed guardians of grammar on the internet.
She’s unqualified to hold the seat for far more egregious reasons than this. This is simply a symptom of the disease of holier than thou intellectualism.
Tags: grammar police, sotomayor
