at least hillary knows the difference between “alternative” and “alternate”

Es­ti­mated reading time is 1 minute.

LAST NIGHT’S SLUGFEST con­sisted of ninety min­utes of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton calling each other names (“liar” popped up more than once) and de­claring each other un­trust­worthy and unfit for of­fice. Policy dif­fer­ences and other mat­ters that should con­cern these two can­di­dates were set aside so that each could im­pugn the basic char­acter of the other! As Politico re­marked, “It was the ugliest de­bate in Amer­ican his­tory.”

But I focus here in­stead on grammar: we now live in a world where sup­pos­edly trained, pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists and in­dustry as­so­ciates uni­ver­sally misuse use al­ter­nate to de­scribe the mul­tiple al­ter­na­tive movie end­ings found on some DVDs, or the bonus tracks of al­ter­na­tive takes found on many CDs

So it is that one can­di­date’s one state­ment shone for me:

Mrs Clinton said of Mr Trump, “I’m sorry I have to keep saying this, but he lives in an al­ter­na­tive reality.”

Brava!!! to Hillary for being one of the few people in America to know the dif­fer­ence be­tween al­ter­na­tive and al­ter­nate and using at them correctly!

I will sleep better at night knowing this gram­marian is leading our country . . .

At least Hillary knows the dif­fer­ence be­tween ‘al­ter­na­tive’ and ‘alternate’—a rarity these days! Click To Tweet

Horsey Trump Clinton 1500

Car­toon by the in­du­bitable David Horsey for The Los An­geles Times.

 

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