Pursuing this subforum I noticed that DrDeth has drawn criticism. I may as well mention his recent post which was both stupid and (worse?) off-topic.
It began with a discussion – which I did NOT start – of the ambiguity in the sentence:
“As for her guilt, I believe in the presumption of innocence for everyone but would agree it’s stronger here than normally.”
What is “stronger”? The guilt, or the presumption of innocence? For me, this grammatical ambiguity was a more interesting diversion than most of the messages in that thread, and I chimed in, noting that the unnecessary preamble “As for guilt” increased the tendency to treat “guilt” as the antecedent of “it.”
Dr. Deth’s replay was not only off-topic – he showed us nothing but a desire to insult and should have posted, if at all, here in the Pit, not in Politics – but also stupid, failing completely to understand the discussion.
But even worse than wasting space than wasting space, he shows stupidity by missing the entire point. When a sentence contains at least two pronouns, a prior sentence may sometimes help dispel ambiguity, but that is not the case here. The controversy is over grammatical ambiguity, and NOT any specific person’s guilt or innocence. Yet DrDeth thinks that the target’s identity is key to understanding whether it is her guilt or innocence *** that is being strengthened by the quoted sentence as written.***
The moral of THIS story: Better to remain silent than to assume a pedantic tone while demonstrating only confusion and stupidity. I’ve not reviewed the charges against DrDeth in this thread, but judging by his effort quoted here, Stupidity should be high on the list of charges.