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Prairie Gates

(7,341 posts)
3. The grammar! My eyes!
Mon Jan 19, 2026, 09:30 AM
Monday


Some close reading. I'm ignoring Trump's goofy capitalization, which has been well-explained as a pure power move to demonstrate that he's not even held to normal conventions of written language. I'm also not commenting on the italicization of the second letter, which is horrible and unprofessional: italicized typefaces should be reserved for highlighting a point; they should not be used to mimic handwriting, as they are here.

Why Dear Jonas? Why use a colon rather than a comma in the salutation if the salutation is so informal?

The "PLUS" transforms the second clause in the first paragraph into another dependent clause, so the whole paragraph is sentence fragment, despite its length:

Considering A and B, (main clause goes here). There is no main clause.

Why do they have a "right of ownership" anyway? I have seen many trolls on the internet, including - ahem - close to home, pretending to care about Inuit independence and Danish colonialism in order to forward this "why do they have a right to ownership" line. Be aware of that.

The comma after "documents" is a comma splice. You cannot connect independent clauses with a comma.

A boat landed there. Trump doesn't use the proper term: a ship. But notice that there is one Danish "boat" and plural boats attributed to the "we."

Trump's punctuation marks are as goofy as his capitalization, but the exclamation mark after "Thank you" stands out.

Notice that Trump lists himself as the 45th President, not the 47th. This is part of his continuing strategy to pretend the Biden term didn't exist.


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