A Twit Tweets

Maybe I shouldn’t say “twit,” but unlike “bimbo” the word is not gender-specific in its connotations, which do not include any sexual ones. The woman Mark Belling referred to was acting like a twit, at least in the moment she spoke about right to work legislation without knowing what it is but thinking she did. Yet she would have been a twit even if she were a man.

Anyway….

Another woman felt compelled to quit her employment with Governor Walker’s campaign – I guess that’s what it is by now – because her tweets proved offensive to Iowans of influence in the Governor’s party. Maybe she deserved a setback. She should rethink the uses of social media before seeking employment as an expert in that field again.

I’ve never tweeted anything, but I do know that tweets lack context. An isolated string of 140 characters, even if they form words and constitute a sentence, has little but itself to give it meaning. Moreover, one who tweets cannot legitimately expect anyone who happens to read a given tweet to be a follower. The same is true of hashtags.

Thus readers are free to give a tweet any context they desire, even compelled to do so. This is what happened to the quitter. She tried to make up for it by issuing a whole paragraph of early morning tweets, but the fact she had to issue them in six or eight installments only tends to prove my point.

In general, only a very profound, or a very trivial, sentence carries its own context with it – that is, sufficient context to make its meaning unmistakable. Users of Twitter should probably confine themselves to the trivial. Unfortunately, most political discourse, on the other hand, is neither profound nor trivial. This is what our Twitter quitter should reflect on.

Tweets are like sound bites that way. Only with sound bites the context, sometimes maliciously, gets edited out. Tweeters have only themselves to blame.

Excuse me...

…but I think I understand the grammar of the English language passably well. Apparently some of the law faculty of Georgetown University, who lately appeared on the News Hour, do not.

In English the subjunctive mood of a verb is sometimes used to express a condition that does not exist. Mr. Obama is not a commentator in the conservative media. If he were, he might have said that “unelected” persons display “judicial activism” when they overturn the deliberate acts of an elected body established for that purpose. But he’s not. And he didn’t. That’s how the subjunctive mood is supposed to work.

So the law professor who said the President’s proposition is “invalid” ignored, or is showing his ignorance of, the form and natural meaning of the sentence in question. Other speeches on this matter, including Mr. Ryan saying the expression was “unpresidential,” have some, if only partisan, cause for overlooking the rules of grammar.

The Georgetown colleague who delivered the counterpoint at least expressed the view that the statement is valid, without taking note of the question of grammar. Maybe that’s even worse, if it means he thinks the President was criticizing “unelected,” “activist” judges. The President made it clear he wasn’t, the following day, without backtracking, but just by expressing himself in the indicative mood.

Yet last Friday, even Mark Shields, whom I respect, didn’t note the construction of the sentence in question either. So perhaps what I call its “natural meaning” no longer holds. There’s a lot more to be said about this – from the people who brought you “Who to Contact,” in a collectively unconscious effort to obliterate the distinction between the nominative and objective cases.

What I heard the President say, I took to be a criticism of the conservative media, who, if they wanted to be consistent with themselves, ought to be criticizing the Court for legislating at all on the matter of insuring for the national health. But they don’t. And they aren’t.