Not Even the English Can Write the Queen’s English Any More
Its turns out that Mrs Clinton’s delay in accepting the president elect’s offer to be his top foreign policy adviser had much to do with her negotiating the terms of the job and insisting on the right to choose her own state department staff and possibly even some of the plumb Ambassador postings.
Obama will have in his gift the right to appoint Supreme Court justices, possibly as many as five out of the nine: Roe v Wade, which gives a woman the right to an abortion if she chooses, would be safe.
Assignments and posts are plum, as in the good stuff in plum-cake, not plumb, as in straight. And the appointments themselves are what the president can give, not “the right” to appoint. He appoints them himself; he doesn’t gift that right to anybody else.
An Englishman of my acquaintance refers to two languages: English and “an American derivative.” His English appears to be slowly dying on the pages of his own country’s papers.
Links via, where else, Hot Air.