I just saw an ad that said: “Never touch, breathe, smell, or handle cat litter again.”
I have no particular hankering to handle cat litter, but if the alternative means giving up on being able to touch, breathe, and smell, then thanks but no thanks.
P.S. – I would like to apologise most abjectly for this post’s title.
P.P.S. – I would like to, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to.
No doubt your Anglo-German colleague, Herr Ball, is scratching out a similar post — adding a clause to the fur-nished tale.
This is why you shouldn’t blog drunk, Roderick.
Or perhaps this is why he should blog drunk.
This reminds me of a Mises Conference I went to about five years ago. I came into the lecture hall during a talk, happy to see that a spot next to Roderick was open. I sat down next to him, leaned over and said,
“Hey man. How are you doing?”
Roderick peered over at me, leaned in and said:
“How am I doing what?”
Which reminds me of a concert where someone in the audience shouted “what’s up”, to which the singer replied “I’ll tell you one time”, pointed his index finger upwards and said “up”.
In high school physics I was taught to say, “The Zenith. It’s the point that’s directly overhead.”
Roderick peered over at me, leaned in and said:
“How am I doing what?”
A perfectly reasonable question which, I must point out, you never answered.
You know, Roderick, you totally stumped me with that one. Another flashback. At another Mises Conference, I was complaining about your never respond to my emails. I asked you,
“Why didn’t you respond to my email?”
And then you said,
“I responded; I just didn’t reply.”
Heh. I’d forgotten that one.
I live to torment you.
Don’t tell me you’re holding to a “rule” from some self-appointed authority like Strunk & White that says you can’t apply a comma-separated list of verbs to a single direct object. Would you prefer “Never touch cat litter, breathe cat litter. . .” ? If you didn’t have to keep repeating the direct object, you could literally decimate your sentence.
+1 for correctly using both “literally” and “decimate”.
Well, “decimate” was a reference to a recent post about abuses of that word. And when I hear people use “literally” as an intensifier, my head figuratively explodes.
One of my college roommates used to say “there were thousands, literally dozens of them!”
“One of my college roommates used to say “there were thousands, literally dozens of them!”
Ha. I suppose technically speaking thousands are “literally dozens.” Just a whole lot of them.
Don’t tell me you’re holding to a “rule” from some self-appointed authority like Strunk & White that says you can’t apply a comma-separated list of verbs to a single direct object.
No, I don’t hold to such a rule. My criticism of the sentence was that it was ambiguous in such a way as to be unintentionally funny, not that it was ungrammatical. It’s the difference between a strategic mistake in chess and a mistake like moving the rook diagonally.
I accept Charles H.’s interpretation of this rule of grammar–all the verbs are parallel, so one direct object could be appropriate, albeit sloppy.
That said, I have to ask: how do you breathe cat litter? And aren’t “touch” and “handle” a bit redundant in this context?
Alex Knapp said: “how do you breathe cat litter?”
Obviously you’ve never emptied a cat box. Most brands of cat litter are made of bits of dry clay which can contain particles small enough to become airborne when disturbed.
But are they still cat litter then?
I just figured he was referring to the final comma being extraneous… I’d have written “Never touch, breathe, smell or handle cat litter again.”
I don’t think the presence or absence of the comma removes the ambiguity.
I like Oxford commas.
I, like, Auburn, commas.