grammar Ford

I’d say the question should be southern grammar or good grammar? :)

Ford continually says “between you and I” and makes other common grammar mistakes, but I don’t think that this one’s a matter of grammar so much as style. When he starts talking like a Ford, the southern colloquialisms come out. He’s being “folksy.”

But as I’ve written, you’d think with his elite education he wouldn’t make such egregious mistakes.

You know, I think this might just be that someone tried using ellipses to represent a pause–in this case, the kind of pause that you make when you change the structure of your sentence part of the way through. He started to say something like, “I don’t have any apologies for that” or “I don’t have to apologize for that” and then changed his mind and said, “No apologies for that” (with the “I have” elided, which is a common enough construction in not-totally-formal speech). I really doubt he said, “I don’t have no” etc. I think one source tried to transcribe what he said exactly, and the other just picked the construction he seemed to be aiming at by the end of his utterance.

We need to invent a punctuation mark for “speaker aborts previous sentence construction and takes up a new one.” I really think it’s the ellipses, which–not to be too prescriptive–are customarily used to indicate omission, that are the culprit here.

You’re exactly right.. I think you posted this comment concurrent with my update.. Check out the video..

I think the ellipsis is legitimate, though an em dash would probably have been more appropriate; no harm done by The Tennessean in my view. That being said, I believe that WMCTV has no business editing Ford’s statement for him. I don’t see media outlets editing Dubya’s statements “to make meaning clearer.”