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Thursday, November 07, 2002 A few words Not long ago, Kathy wanted to Take Back the Language, and Andrea is frequently vexed by things grammatical, but what annoys me is simple carelessness, like this: A letter written by Professor Peter Kirstein and posted by Instapundit, who accurately describes it as barely literate, contains the phrase "...reign death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples..."  You can rain upon them or you can reign over them, but I’m not sure how you reign upon them. I’ll have to admit, though, sproofing (proofreading via spellchecker) is often more amusing than annoying. My favorite example is a memo a client sent me asking that I give such and such data to Tallahassee because it was "proscribed by the state." I asked if I could send it to him and let him go to jail, or did he, perhaps, mean "prescribed?" And this, from Tacitus: Hesiod calls tonight's Republican wins a "victory for the bin Ladin/Hussein ticket." I think we can expect a lot of these sour grapes from the left in coming weeks and months... Sour Grapes comes from Aesop’s story of a fox who gives up trying to reach a bunch of grapes, saying, "That's okay. They were probably sour anyway."  I don’t think Hesiod is saying it's okay, even ironically.  If the quote had been, "No matter.  Democrats are lucky they don’t have to deal with terrorism,"  that would have been sour grapes. UPDATE: Frank says  Terry McAuliffe, on the other hand, knows there is nothing he can do to save himself and thus has gone into complete denial trying to convince everyone that the election was no big deal. That's sour grapes.   sez Doug Murray 1:07:27 PM   sez you [] Copyright 2002 © Doug Murray