{"id":1640,"date":"2009-05-23T08:50:23","date_gmt":"2009-05-23T12:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1640"},"modified":"2009-05-23T08:50:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-23T12:50:23","slug":"u-s-secretary-of-mixed-metaphors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1640","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Secretary of Mixed Metaphors"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Investing in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field,” said Arne Duncan in discussing California education<\/a>, 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,<\/p>\n

Everyone asks me that. We usually don’t play one-on-one. We usually play on the same team. We do pretty good.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one has spoken<\/em> using<\/b> 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<\/em>? Even if it is largely irrelevant to policy debates, this is at least a little embarrassing. <\/p>\n

Addendum<\/b> (2 pm): And to prove that no one is perfect, I realized that I should have used using<\/b> in the paragraph above, where I have now added it. That correction does not necessarily make me any better a user<\/i> of language than I was at 9 in the morning, but maybe I am a little less of an ab<\/i>user of language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-qs","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}