5 Times Donald Trump P.O’d Our Copy Editors During The Second Presidential Debate
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
As copy editors, we’re trained to spot errors in consistency, grammar, and syntax. As feminists, we’ve learned to be critical about everything we see and hear.
As both, we were ༼ノಠل͟ಠ༽ノ ︵ ┻━┻ by Donald Trump’s performance in last night’s presidential debate.
Here are the five most egregious mistakes that would give any copy editor nightmares, in ascending order:
- When he said: “I’m not unproud of it to be honest with you.”
The way Trump uses the double negative is confusing, and it makes him sound dishonest, to be honest with you.
- When he said: “ It’s just words, folks. Just words. Those words, I’ve been hearing them for many years. I heard them when they were running for the Senate. In New York.” and “Same with the Latino Americans. The hispanic Americans. The same exact thing. They talk, they don’t get it done.”
The pronoun agreement is entirely nonexistent, so it sounds like the words are running for Senate. And more seriously, it sounds like Latinx Americans don’t do anything and don’t “get it done.”
- When he said: “I was so surprised to see him sign on with the devil, but when you talk about apology, I think the one you should really be apologizing for and this thing you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted and that you acid washed and then the two boxes of e-mails and other things last week taken from an office and are now missing.”
It’s a run-on sentence – and also just bad.
- When he said: “But it’s locker room talk and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. We’re going to defeat ISIS.”
The logical flow of this is…interesting. Locker room talk + one of those things = ISIS?
- When he said: “When I watched the Iran deal being made, some horrible things like Obamacare, health insurance, and health care.”
REPETITION. Obamacare, health insurance, and health care, especially in this context are understood to be the same thing.
HONORABLE MENTION: “I’ll tell you what I didn’t think I’d say this and I’m going to say it and hate to say it.”
Suffice to say, we were surprised to learn that Donald Trump was the sixth member of the Spice Girls. Tell me what you want, Donald. Tell me what you really, really want.
Shoutout to Vox for their quick transcribing skills.
By Vivian Giang, Danna Yu, and Ceejay Lee
