Learn English or go home!
All right kiddos, here’s your terrible sentence of the day, courtesy of Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle:
I think this is not just wrong, not just unjust, but truly and utterly immoral in every sense of the word.
Where to even begin with this one . . .
First of all, there are lots and lots of senses of the word ‘immoral.’ There’s at least one sense for every moral there is to be contravened. Promiscuous, for example, is one sense of the word ‘immoral’. Ms. Riddle here is talking about giving entitlements to illegal immigrants, which you wouldn’t say is promiscuous, would you? So the phrase ‘in every sense of the word’ is inaccurate and careless, and it can go.
And isn’t ‘immoral’ a fairly tepid extension of ‘wrong’ and ‘unjust’? It doesn’t do them one better so much as it rephrases them. I mean, we’re talking about political speech here. We’re talking about anti-immigrant political speech. Where is the hyperbolic rhetoric to fire up the nativist hordes? I’m thinking ‘pernicious’. ‘Despicable’. ‘Vile’.
While we’re on the topic of word choice, let’s consider the parenthetical phrase ‘not just unjust’. Then we agree: let’s just strike that one outright.
Though the cliché ‘truly and utterly’ as it is used here can be forgiven for its emptiness on account of the emphasis it lends to ‘immoral’, might I suggest recycling ‘unjust’ — a far more powerful word than ‘immoral’ anyway — to the same effect, in combination with one of the terms above? ‘Vile and unjust’, for example.
Finally, ‘I think this is not just wrong. . .’ Well no shit. I’m sorry, Debbie, but your opinions are far too outrageous and absurd to be confused with fact. However, if you’re trying to invigorate the bigotry of your constituents, you should probably frame them as fact anyway and drop any qualifiers.
So where does that leave us?
This is not just wrong, it is vile and unjust.
Conciseness: the next best thing to shutting the fuck up.
