Criticizing the grammar in the tweets of the current White House occupant seems like swinging at the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but there are Americans reading his misspealings and random CapitalizatIons and thinking they are normal. Many adults can laugh off his constant abuse of the language, but think of those who look toward him as "a very smart person," and think, God forbid, of the children who might be reading his tweets and repeating his grammatical examples in their school assignments.
Today the topic is commas because of two howling errors in recent tweets (and I'm making an effort to not look at all of his 280-character presidential pronouncements, so these are two found at random).
This morning came the "Just call me Kate" tweet:
And two days ago he tweeted about his son, Donald, [sic] and his "important new book":
The error in first tweet should be obvious. He is asking all of us to call him Kate. If he were asking someone named Kate to call him, he should have included a comma before her name to show that she is the one being addressed. But wouldn't it be wonderful if simply calling him Kate would solve all our problems?
The error in the second tweet is more interesting. The president might have to go back and study the rules about appositives, but by placing commas around "Donald," he is clearly suggesting that he only has one son. Is this actually an error, or is the stable grammatical genius subtly trying to tell us something about the paternity of Eric and Barron?
