“Investing in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field,” said Arne Duncan in discussing California education, and I wince. This is a Secretary of Education who thinks “incent” is a word, and when asked yesterday what happens when he plays the president in basketball, he answered,
Everyone asks me that. We usually don’t play one-on-one. We usually play on the same team. We do pretty good.
No one has spoken using perfectly-correct grammar since Peter Jennings died, and Duncan is nowhere close to Joe Biden on the embarrassment scale (let alone GWB). But for someone who runs a Department of Education? Even if it is largely irrelevant to policy debates, this is at least a little embarrassing.
Addendum (2 pm): And to prove that no one is perfect, I realized that I should have used using in the paragraph above, where I have now added it. That correction does not necessarily make me any better a user of language than I was at 9 in the morning, but maybe I am a little less of an abuser of language.