Trump-haters making democracy impossible

[usmbguest5318]

POTUS " out-of-the-gate" [sic]

Really?

"Two or more words that collectively act as an adjective should be hyphenated when they appear immediately before the noun they modify. This helps prevent misreading."

Yes, sic. You're not wrong about the hyphen rule. That particular phrase as you used it, however, doesn't need hyphens because contextually there's no different meaning of the phrase with or without them.

• Right Out of the Gate - Phrase Meaning and the Idiom's Origins
• The Mastery Of The Hyphen
  The general rule for compounding is simple enough. Do not use the hyphen unless a difference in meaning is required. A poor-farm is not necessarily a poor farm. A glass house is different from a glass-house, a green house from a green-house. And out in the country, says a humorist, people distinguish between a near neighbor and a near-neighbor.

The reader is well aware that Trump did not literally come out of the gate itself. Also, the reader knows you do not mean that Trump literally came through (out of) a gate. Thus the idiomatic interpretation is the only rational one to apply to the phrase as you used it.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board with emoticons of dancing guys and smiley faces flipping each other off. It makes it worse if it is something so petty as whether I should have hyphenated "out-of-the-gate". Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board

"[Sic]" is not used to expressly correct someone. It's used to indicate that the writer quoting another's remarks is aware that there is something errant in the way the original author presented the remark and that the error is not the current writer's. I used it because I quoted your writing in my sentence rather than outside of it, such as by using a "quote box."

But for your challenging my use of "[sic]," I'd not have expounded upon my having used [sic], and I certainly wouldn't have bothered to explicitly note what was amiss that led me to use it. Had your point of contention been justified/accurate, I'd have simply "owned" my mistake and moved on, perhaps also offering a clarification of my meaning if such were warranted. (I've done so on more than one occasion. I'm well aware that my USMB posts often contain typos, sometimes a lot of them. Some I discover in time to correct them. Some I do not timely find. Of others, indeed many, I just don't give a damn because nothing I write for USMB has a bearing on how I'm judged by people whose opinion of me I value.)

Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I really didn't think you'd genuinely want to go down that road; apparently, however, you do...

You'd be correct about the hyphenation but for "out of the gate" existing in English as an idiom. Were it not idiomatically understood to and accepted as having the temporal denotation you note you intended, I would agree with you. (In which case I'd also not have used "[sic].") I provided the first reference link in post 298 to illustrate the phrase's acceptance as an idiom unto itself.

BTW, "out of the gate" is strictly speaking an adverbial prepositional phrase, although some might call it an adverbial phrase. The "adverbial" aspect accrues from the phrase's temporal quality, "when" being a piece of meaning adverbs convey. "Out of the gate" identifies when an action took place, which not a function of adjectives. Thus, though you think you used the phrase as an adjective, you did not because adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs, thus adverbial phrases, can modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.



Note:

• Why am I indulging this discussion line? Because I suspect that 300+ posts in, there's little or nothing of note to add to the substance of the thread topic, so I'm willing to engage on this marginally amusing line. If you think there is, however, thematically relevant ground left uncovered with regard to your thread topic, I'll drop this line of chit chat.

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

I almost was willing to concede the adjectival use of "out of the gate" but for one thing: the phrase is inherently a temporal one. That is to say it identifies when the "full-throttle attempt" commenced; thus the phrase is necessarily adverbial. Adverbs (adverbial phrases) identify, along with "how" and "where," "when" with regard to the word/phrase they modify. Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Your explanation above of your intended meaning further solidified my conviction of the adverbial use rather than a possibly adjectival use of the idiom; you explicitly note the temporal aspect by indicating your meaning as "immediately on day one." That's a temporal attribute -- "immediately" and "on day one" are both indicators of time, of when -- not qualitative indications of nature or extent, which is what adjectives indicate. Plus, "immediately" is clearly an adverb.

Given your having stated that you want "out of the box" to modify "attempt," I suspect that you intended denotation for that phrase is "immediate attempt." (One can reverse the order of those two words if one seeks a deliberately so-called "poetic" construction, but doing so wouldn't alter the meaning.) What you wrote, however, is denotatively and grammatically equivalent to "immediately naked."

Why? Because, as and for the reasons discussed above, "out of the box" is adverbial, and the hyphen (because the phrase is an accepted idiom) doesn't change it to adjectival. Because "out of the box" is adverbial, it cannot modify a noun, and because it cannot, it must modify either an adjective, verb or other adverb. For the sentence in question, the only real choices are "naked" and "full-throttle," not "Trump." (I never thought "Trump," or an action performed by Trump, was what was that phrase modifies.)

That means, then, that one must determine which of those adjectives the phrase modifies. You separated "full-throttle" and "out of the box" with commas, so that may tell us. Now, I could walk through the various types of commas and what they'd mean, but the reality is that I don't have enough information about what you intended to know without a doubt whether you'd sooner have "out of the box" modify "full-throttle" or "naked." Accordingly, I'm going to move on to my last point, which, with any luck, will make clear why I opted not to discuss commas and the meaning their appearance conveys. Were I to guess, I'd say it's "naked" that you would prefer to modify.

Lastly -- and this gets into abstruse grammar points that make a huge difference and that most people ignore, never learned, or forgot -- there are a few ways to achieve the adjectival meaning you say you intended. The ways to do that are:

• Connect "naked" to "out of the box" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival and uses the serial comma to indicate that "full-throttle" and "out-of-the-box-naked" both modify "attempt." This is an contrivedly sophisticated way to do it, but it gets the job done in a way that doesn't create ambiguity, which, here, is all it needs to do. After all, you're not writing for a paying audience or to boost your prosaic renown.
• Use "and" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle and out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival.
• Change the sentence to a stronger, more active construction --> This solution, though it doesn't produce an adjectival phrase, is the one I'd choose. I would because doing so inherently solves the problem by using "attempt" as a verb, which, for your sentence (intended meaning), is the best choice. Changing the sentence to a more active construction, one might write the following:
  
  -- "The press has never before and from day one nakedly attempted full throttle to bring down a president."
  
  I suspect that sentence's meaning is what you had in mind when you constructed the passive voice one you posted:
  
  -- "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  
• Use "attempt to" rather than "attempt by" --> This approach produces the type of construction I suspect you had in mind. I don't prefer it to the one immediately above, but it works and lacks ambiguity.
  
  -- "There has never been an unabashedly full-throttle, out of the gate media attempt to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  The problem with the original sentence comes from "attempt." That word, and words like it, are best used as verbs if one is going to use them in a quasi-passive construction, i.e, following them with "by so and so" rather than with "to," such as "...in an attempt to [whatever]." The reason is that they inherently denote movement, motion, action, so when they are used as nouns in a near-passive formulation, it takes great skill to keep unambiguous the sentence containing them. Even having great skill, it's very easy to make a simple mistake that leads to the type of confusion we've been discussing.
  
  I realize you, the author, aren't confused because you know what meaning was in your mind as you penned the sentence. Careful readers are the ones confused. Fortunately for your sentence, the confusion is minor and has, or for me had, little impact on the reader's ability to comprehend you. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, all the ways one might reasonably construe the sentence amount to essentially the same things. The differences in meaning could, at best, only result in quibbling.
  

FWIW, were I still teaching, the overall weak grammatical construction of the original sentence -- the ambiguity accruing from the adverbial phrase and the passive voice are what make it weak; the idea itself is not grammatically weak -- is what I'd note and, depending on how many weak sentences appeared in the document and the overall, i.e., absent grammatical weaknesses, quality of the writer's ideas and their development, I might deduct a few points (between two and five) from the assignment.

I did that for several reasons:

• I was a teaching assistant at one of the nation's most elite schools. Students were presumed upon admission to have mastered and without exception apply all the fine points of English grammar, and by the time the got to my class, they also were expected, furthermore, to have mastered and without fail apply the nuances of collegiate composition. Whether one had or had not was beside the point; the expectation, thus grading criterion, was there. I didn't have a choice. Students could always go to my supervising professor to appeal the grade I assigned, and if he observed that I had gone easy on the grammar expectation, that'd have been a demerit against me.
• It provided me and my supervising professor with a small measure of what he called "magister's" discretion. That came into play at the end of the term. If I had students who'd made themselves and their efforts and knowledge keenly aware to me, if I felt they deserved a break and they'd lost a few grammar points, I could push them up a point or two if doing so got them to the next grade. Mind you, there were plenty of students about whom I knew to nothing beyond what they turned in. I didn't push them anywhere unless the curve forced my prof, thus me, to do so.
• Most students were pretty sharp. If I didn't take off points for grammar, I'd have had too many students earning the same grade, even though they weren't at the same overall level of academic mastery. The reality is that mastery of English counts outside of English class. Ditto math, but that didn't much come into play in the classes I taught; the math wasn't hard or convoluted.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Really?

"Two or more words that collectively act as an adjective should be hyphenated when they appear immediately before the noun they modify. This helps prevent misreading."

Yes, sic. You're not wrong about the hyphen rule. That particular phrase as you used it, however, doesn't need hyphens because contextually there's no different meaning of the phrase with or without them.

• Right Out of the Gate - Phrase Meaning and the Idiom's Origins
• The Mastery Of The Hyphen
  The general rule for compounding is simple enough. Do not use the hyphen unless a difference in meaning is required. A poor-farm is not necessarily a poor farm. A glass house is different from a glass-house, a green house from a green-house. And out in the country, says a humorist, people distinguish between a near neighbor and a near-neighbor.

The reader is well aware that Trump did not literally come out of the gate itself. Also, the reader knows you do not mean that Trump literally came through (out of) a gate. Thus the idiomatic interpretation is the only rational one to apply to the phrase as you used it.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board with emoticons of dancing guys and smiley faces flipping each other off. It makes it worse if it is something so petty as whether I should have hyphenated "out-of-the-gate". Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board

"[Sic]" is not used to expressly correct someone. It's used to indicate that the writer quoting another's remarks is aware that there is something errant in the way the original author presented the remark and that the error is not the current writer's. I used it because I quoted your writing in my sentence rather than outside of it, such as by using a "quote box."

But for your challenging my use of "[sic]," I'd not have expounded upon my having used [sic], and I certainly wouldn't have bothered to explicitly note what was amiss that led me to use it. Had your point of contention been justified/accurate, I'd have simply "owned" my mistake and moved on, perhaps also offering a clarification of my meaning if such were warranted. (I've done so on more than one occasion. I'm well aware that my USMB posts often contain typos, sometimes a lot of them. Some I discover in time to correct them. Some I do not timely find. Of others, indeed many, I just don't give a damn because nothing I write for USMB has a bearing on how I'm judged by people whose opinion of me I value.)

Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I really didn't think you'd genuinely want to go down that road; apparently, however, you do...

You'd be correct about the hyphenation but for "out of the gate" existing in English as an idiom. Were it not idiomatically understood to and accepted as having the temporal denotation you note you intended, I would agree with you. (In which case I'd also not have used "[sic].") I provided the first reference link in post 298 to illustrate the phrase's acceptance as an idiom unto itself.

BTW, "out of the gate" is strictly speaking an adverbial prepositional phrase, although some might call it an adverbial phrase. The "adverbial" aspect accrues from the phrase's temporal quality, "when" being a piece of meaning adverbs convey. "Out of the gate" identifies when an action took place, which not a function of adjectives. Thus, though you think you used the phrase as an adjective, you did not because adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs, thus adverbial phrases, can modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.



Note:

• Why am I indulging this discussion line? Because I suspect that 300+ posts in, there's little or nothing of note to add to the substance of the thread topic, so I'm willing to engage on this marginally amusing line. If you think there is, however, thematically relevant ground left uncovered with regard to your thread topic, I'll drop this line of chit chat.

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

By reporting the news? How much "fake news" was actually reported and not retracted; where is wikileaks now?

where is wikileaks now?

I don't know, but I know nobody's imploring Assange to find stuff on Trump and his cronies. I don't know that it'd do any good were they to do so, but the point is that nobody's asking, not whether asking would yield results.

 

[Billo_Really]

You are confused.

That asshole Obama got most of what he wanted. He got more debt, more welfare, more government, more regulations, higher taxes, Obamacare, two shithead extreme left wing asshole supreme court justices and just about everything his little black heart wanted. The only thing the sonofabitch didn't get was confiscation of firearms and that third Libtard asshole on the court, which we all think is a good thing.

The RINOs kissed his black ass pretty much so,

How could he get what he wanted when you racist republicans wouldn't do shit for 8 straight years. For 8 years, you hayseed-dickboy-rednecks only had one agenda item, "make Obama a one term President". You had a majority in the House and you'd rather cut off your own dick than do anything that would help Obama.

He did things for you bigots, why couldn't you reciprocate? He continued these illegal and immoral wars you fuckers started. And no, he didn't try to get your bullshit little guns. Fuck your guns! I could care less about the 2nd amendment.

 

[Billo_Really]

The point, since I need to spell it out, is here is hard evidence, not the monkey piss they are throwing at Trump, but hard evidence of Israeli interests not only funding a US pres candidate but manipulating the election (Univision). This is ignored while the skunks pursue chimera. And it's not just the press failing to make this a story, they were in the fucking room themselves. If you can't see the treason in this then you are hopeless.

Why didn't you say this instead of throwing up random emails?

If that is your point, then I agree with it.

 

[Valerie]

More nonsense over nothing as to the Boy Scouts
He gave them a buck it up talk and the weeper libs are melting

Donald Trump contaminates everything he touches. So no one should have been surprised when his speech at the Boy Scouts’ national jamboree took a nasty turn into partisan politics. After all, it’s always about him.


But there is a larger issue at stake here: the fate of the Boy Scouts of America, which has been slowly evolving out of its discriminatory past. As an Eagle scout, a former scoutmaster, and the father of an Eagle scout, I really care about the future of the organization. And I’m concerned that President Trump’s toxic rhetoric will stain a movement already seen by many as anachronistic.


Make no mistake — Trump’s speech on Monday went well beyond the bounds of anodyne patriotism that has characterized remarks delivered to the scouts by past presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. As he has repeatedly, Trump dwelled on his Electoral College victory map, which was “so red it was unbelievable.” He derided the “fake media,” claiming they would play down the size of the crowd — as though (as The Washington Post put it) the 30,000 scouts had turned out for him rather than the jamboree. He boasted that he’d bring “Merry Christmas” back into the lexicon, ignorant of scouting’s embrace of all religious faiths. He put in a plug for “killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare.”


And yes, the scouts booed Trump’s reference to Hillary Clinton and chanted “USA! USA! USA!” a few times. But scouting is a pretty conservative movement, and I have no doubt that many of those in attendance were Trump supporters. Those of us in Blue New England are outliers within the BSA, and the president’s actions were not helpful to the idea that scouting is for everyone, not just for kids in red states. Indeed, based on some of the reaction I’ve seen on Twitter, many people already believe the worst about the Boy Scouts, and they saw Trump’s remarks as confirmation of their stereotyped views rather than as a transgressive outburst.

Let me also put to rest the notion that Trump shouldn’t have been invited. Scouting has always had a close relationship with the federal government. It has held a congressional charter since 1916. The president of the United States is also the honorary president of the BSA. My Eagle card is signed by Richard Nixon; my son’s by George W. Bush. The problem isn’t that Trump was invited. It was solely in what he said. Now he has put the national organization in an impossible position.

How Trump's Toxic Touch Could Divide The Scouting Movement

 

[bripat9643]

Making Democracy impossible? The GOP controls everything. The federal government, the Supreme Court, most state legislatures, most governorships..... but everything is the Democrat's fault? LOL

Republicans control nothing in Washington because they don't know how to use their power in anything constructive. Democratic ideology has been driving society in the direction they want it to go. Most Republican politicians don't know what they stand for and are weak I think and are always willing to to do business with the other side in a way the Democrats would never do.

The Democrats control the news media except for one TV news channel that they all hate, talk radio and some internet sites. The Democratic leadership and the majority of the news media support each other in the feeding frenzy to take down Trump or oppose every single thing he tries to do. That was the plan from the begining no matter what they found or made up. Hillary not being elected meant everything Obama accomplished was at risk. There's absolutely no way they would let that go just because the American people voted for it. They see most Americans as Rubes, so dont look for the Dems to operate ethically.

Quit trying to figure out what democrats want and start trying to figure out what republicans want, to your politics it is a much more relevant question.

We know what Republicans want. The problem is some douche bag establishment Republican politicians who are more concerned about what the lobbyists want than what their voters want.

 

[Valerie]

You Trump-haters have opposed him from his first day in office--not his policies, but him.


...

bullshit. did your dad vlad tell you to say that?



Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), fresh off a brain cancer diagnosis that he is statistically unlikely to beat, is apparently all out of f*cks to give. Today, he tweeted an article in the opinion section of the Washington Post, calling it a “must-read.” The article in question? “Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia.”


The op-ed holds absolutely nothing back.

...excerpts from the piece:


But once again, President Trump — after extended personal contact with Vladimir Putin and the complete surrender to Russian interests in Syria — acts precisely as though he has been bought and sold by a strategic rival. The ignoble cutoff of aid to American proxies means that “Putin won in Syria,” as an administration official was quoted by The Post. Concessions without reciprocation, made against the better judgment of foreign policy advisers, smack more of payoff than outreach. If this is what Trump’s version of “winning” looks like, what might further victory entail? The re- creation of the Warsaw Pact? The reversion of Alaska to Russian control?

…

There is nothing normal about an American president’s subservience to Russia’s interests and worldview. It is not the result of some bold, secret, Nixonian foreign policy stratagem — the most laughable possible explanation. Does it come from Trump’s bad case of authoritarianism envy? A fundamental sympathy with European right-wing, anti-democratic populism? An exposure to pressure from his checkered financial history? There are no benign explanations, and the worst ones seem the most plausible.

…

The problem is the damage to U.S. interests done in the meantime. It now seems that the Russians — by meddling in a presidential election and by playing down such aggression — have achieved an intelligence coup beyond the dreams of the Soviet era. The result is an America strategically and morally disarmed.

The fact that John McCain is posting such a strongly worded article about Trump’s surrender to Russia is extremely telling, and begs the question: Behind closed doors, how many other Republicans feel this way? In public, it’s obvious that Republicans feel they must present a united front against the Democratic Party and forces of the left. However, despite recent silence from #NeverTrump conservatives, it wasn’t even a year ago that leadership figures such as Paul Ryan were dead set against him. Given the fact they are spineless, how much pressure will it take to get them to turn against him?

If Donald Trump’s numbers keep dropping, primarily among Republicans, I think you’ll see it happen.


Here’s Senator McCain’s tweet:

Must-read @MJGerson @washingtonpost: “Trump’s breathtaking surrender to #Russia” Opinion | Trump’s breathtaking surrender to Russia

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) July 21, 2017


John McCain Just Savaged Trump On Twitter (TWEET) | If You Only News

 

[cnelsen]

Not hate:

your leadership, mr trump, has empowered and emboldened the worst kind of human hatred while marginalizing those who object AS IF they are the hateful ones. with all due respect, sir... fuck you very very much...and the ignorant horse you rode in on!

LOL

 

[cnelsen]

Donald Trump was elected by the people of the United States to a four year term. He is the person we chose to execute the laws of our Republic. We chose him according to the method as provided in our Constitution--the supreme law of the land. You Trump-haters have opposed him from his first day in office--not his policies, but him. You have attacked him like a pack of vicious dogs every minute of every day of his administration--not his policies, but him. In other words, you have spent every day since he took office attacking our democracy itself.

You seek to bring him down. That means you seek to overturn the election. That means you seek to bring down our system of government. .

Wow- that sounds just like how Trump acted towards President Obama.

President Obama was elected by the people of the United for 2 four year terms.

Trump spent 5 years trying to make Americans think that President Obama was not our legally elected President.

Where was your outrage then?

My outrage at the treasonous media as it concerns its member, Trump? Didn't have any.

 

[cnelsen]

Trump should have federal agents raid the Washington Post on Monday morning and have every person there arrested on charges of treason. He should keep them in jail until the end of his term.

Not a surprise that a Trump supporter also despises the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.

No, Twinky, I despise those who have defiled the 1A and traitorously co-opted it to serve alien interests.

 

[cnelsen]

Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Sure they do: An early meeting.

 

[cnelsen]

Really?

"Two or more words that collectively act as an adjective should be hyphenated when they appear immediately before the noun they modify. This helps prevent misreading."

Yes, sic. You're not wrong about the hyphen rule. That particular phrase as you used it, however, doesn't need hyphens because contextually there's no different meaning of the phrase with or without them.

• Right Out of the Gate - Phrase Meaning and the Idiom's Origins
• The Mastery Of The Hyphen
  The general rule for compounding is simple enough. Do not use the hyphen unless a difference in meaning is required. A poor-farm is not necessarily a poor farm. A glass house is different from a glass-house, a green house from a green-house. And out in the country, says a humorist, people distinguish between a near neighbor and a near-neighbor.

The reader is well aware that Trump did not literally come out of the gate itself. Also, the reader knows you do not mean that Trump literally came through (out of) a gate. Thus the idiomatic interpretation is the only rational one to apply to the phrase as you used it.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board with emoticons of dancing guys and smiley faces flipping each other off. It makes it worse if it is something so petty as whether I should have hyphenated "out-of-the-gate". Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board

"[Sic]" is not used to expressly correct someone. It's used to indicate that the writer quoting another's remarks is aware that there is something errant in the way the original author presented the remark and that the error is not the current writer's. I used it because I quoted your writing in my sentence rather than outside of it, such as by using a "quote box."

But for your challenging my use of "[sic]," I'd not have expounded upon my having used [sic], and I certainly wouldn't have bothered to explicitly note what was amiss that led me to use it. Had your point of contention been justified/accurate, I'd have simply "owned" my mistake and moved on, perhaps also offering a clarification of my meaning if such were warranted. (I've done so on more than one occasion. I'm well aware that my USMB posts often contain typos, sometimes a lot of them. Some I discover in time to correct them. Some I do not timely find. Of others, indeed many, I just don't give a damn because nothing I write for USMB has a bearing on how I'm judged by people whose opinion of me I value.)

Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I really didn't think you'd genuinely want to go down that road; apparently, however, you do...

You'd be correct about the hyphenation but for "out of the gate" existing in English as an idiom. Were it not idiomatically understood to and accepted as having the temporal denotation you note you intended, I would agree with you. (In which case I'd also not have used "[sic].") I provided the first reference link in post 298 to illustrate the phrase's acceptance as an idiom unto itself.

BTW, "out of the gate" is strictly speaking an adverbial prepositional phrase, although some might call it an adverbial phrase. The "adverbial" aspect accrues from the phrase's temporal quality, "when" being a piece of meaning adverbs convey. "Out of the gate" identifies when an action took place, which not a function of adjectives. Thus, though you think you used the phrase as an adjective, you did not because adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs, thus adverbial phrases, can modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.



Note:

• Why am I indulging this discussion line? Because I suspect that 300+ posts in, there's little or nothing of note to add to the substance of the thread topic, so I'm willing to engage on this marginally amusing line. If you think there is, however, thematically relevant ground left uncovered with regard to your thread topic, I'll drop this line of chit chat.

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

I almost was willing to concede the adjectival use of "out of the gate" but for one thing: the phrase is inherently a temporal one. That is to say it identifies when the "full-throttle attempt" commenced; thus the phrase is necessarily adverbial. Adverbs (adverbial phrases) identify, along with "how" and "where," "when" with regard to the word/phrase they modify. Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Your explanation above of your intended meaning further solidified my conviction of the adverbial use rather than a possibly adjectival use of the idiom; you explicitly note the temporal aspect by indicating your meaning as "immediately on day one." That's a temporal attribute -- "immediately" and "on day one" are both indicators of time, of when -- not qualitative indications of nature or extent, which is what adjectives indicate. Plus, "immediately" is clearly an adverb.

Given your having stated that you want "out of the box" to modify "attempt," I suspect that you intended denotation for that phrase is "immediate attempt." (One can reverse the order of those two words if one seeks a deliberately so-called "poetic" construction, but doing so wouldn't alter the meaning.) What you wrote, however, is denotatively and grammatically equivalent to "immediately naked."

Why? Because, as and for the reasons discussed above, "out of the box" is adverbial, and the hyphen (because the phrase is an accepted idiom) doesn't change it to adjectival. Because "out of the box" is adverbial, it cannot modify a noun, and because it cannot, it must modify either an adjective, verb or other adverb. For the sentence in question, the only real choices are "naked" and "full-throttle," not "Trump." (I never thought "Trump," or an action performed by Trump, was what was that phrase modifies.)

That means, then, that one must determine which of those adjectives the phrase modifies. You separated "full-throttle" and "out of the box" with commas, so that may tell us. Now, I could walk through the various types of commas and what they'd mean, but the reality is that I don't have enough information about what you intended to know without a doubt whether you'd sooner have "out of the box" modify "full-throttle" or "naked." Accordingly, I'm going to move on to my last point, which, with any luck, will make clear why I opted not to discuss commas and the meaning their appearance conveys. Were I to guess, I'd say it's "naked" that you would prefer to modify.

Lastly -- and this gets into abstruse grammar points that make a huge difference and that most people ignore, never learned, or forgot -- there are a few ways to achieve the adjectival meaning you say you intended. The ways to do that are:

• Connect "naked" to "out of the box" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival and uses the serial comma to indicate that "full-throttle" and "out-of-the-box-naked" both modify "attempt." This is an contrivedly sophisticated way to do it, but it gets the job done in a way that doesn't create ambiguity, which, here, is all it needs to do. After all, you're not writing for a paying audience or to boost your prosaic renown.
• Use "and" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle and out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival.
• Change the sentence to a stronger, more active construction --> This solution, though it doesn't produce an adjectival phrase, is the one I'd choose. I would because doing so inherently solves the problem by using "attempt" as a verb, which, for your sentence (intended meaning), is the best choice. Changing the sentence to a more active construction, one might write the following:
  
  -- "The press has never before and from day one nakedly attempted full throttle to bring down a president."
  
  I suspect that sentence's meaning is what you had in mind when you constructed the passive voice one you posted:
  
  -- "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  
• Use "attempt to" rather than "attempt by" --> This approach produces the type of construction I suspect you had in mind. I don't prefer it to the one immediately above, but it works and lacks ambiguity.
  
  -- "There has never been an unabashedly full-throttle, out of the gate media attempt to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  The problem with the original sentence comes from "attempt." That word, and words like it, are best used as verbs if one is going to use them in a quasi-passive construction, i.e, following them with "by so and so" rather than with "to," such as "...in an attempt to [whatever]." The reason is that they inherently denote movement, motion, action, so when they are used as nouns in a near-passive formulation, it takes great skill to keep unambiguous the sentence containing them. Even having great skill, it's very easy to make a simple mistake that leads to the type of confusion we've been discussing.
  
  I realize you, the author, aren't confused because you know what meaning was in your mind as you penned the sentence. Careful readers are the ones confused. Fortunately for your sentence, the confusion is minor and has, or for me had, little impact on the reader's ability to comprehend you. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, all the ways one might reasonably construe the sentence amount to essentially the same things. The differences in meaning could, at best, only result in quibbling.

FWIW, were I still teaching, the overall weak grammatical construction of the original sentence -- the ambiguity accruing from the adverbial phrase and the passive voice are what make it weak; the idea itself is not grammatically weak -- is what I'd note and, depending on how many weak sentences appeared in the document and the overall, i.e., absent grammatical weaknesses, quality of the writer's ideas and their development, I might deduct a few points (between two and five) from the assignment.

I did that for several reasons:

• I was a teaching assistant at one of the nation's most elite schools. Students were presumed upon admission to have mastered and without exception apply all the fine points of English grammar, and by the time the got to my class, they also were expected, furthermore, to have mastered and without fail apply the nuances of collegiate composition. Whether one had or had not was beside the point; the expectation, thus grading criterion, was there. I didn't have a choice. Students could always go to my supervising professor to appeal the grade I assigned, and if he observed that I had gone easy on the grammar expectation, that'd have been a demerit against me.
• It provided me and my supervising professor with a small measure of what he called "magister's" discretion. That came into play at the end of the term. If I had students who'd made themselves and their efforts and knowledge keenly aware to me, if I felt they deserved a break and they'd lost a few grammar points, I could push them up a point or two if doing so got them to the next grade. Mind you, there were plenty of students about whom I knew to nothing beyond what they turned in. I didn't push them anywhere unless the curve forced my prof, thus me, to do so.
• Most students were pretty sharp. If I didn't take off points for grammar, I'd have had too many students earning the same grade, even though they weren't at the same overall level of academic mastery. The reality is that mastery of English counts outside of English class. Ditto math, but that didn't much come into play in the classes I taught; the math wasn't hard or convoluted.

I-give-you an "E" for Effort, but I'm un-budged. They're is a "stackexchange' community for English-I-visit sometimes we could submit the question their and see what they come up with: They also-give-points-for-good-answers and that sort of thing and given "the amount of time" you spent on you're answers, you should at least be getting points-for-them.

 

[cnelsen]

But once again, President Trump — after extended personal contact with Vladimir Putin and the complete surrender to Russian interests in Syria — acts precisely as though he has been bought and sold by a strategic rival.

Wooohoooo! Israel's most compliant traitor in the Senate dares use the words "bought and sold? That IS rich. The old shit head traitor can't die soon enough. By "surrender to Russian interests" he means "the US won't risk thermonuclear war with Russia for the sake of doing Israel's ethnic-cleansing for them".

 

[usmbguest5318]

Yes, sic. You're not wrong about the hyphen rule. That particular phrase as you used it, however, doesn't need hyphens because contextually there's no different meaning of the phrase with or without them.

• Right Out of the Gate - Phrase Meaning and the Idiom's Origins
• The Mastery Of The Hyphen
  The general rule for compounding is simple enough. Do not use the hyphen unless a difference in meaning is required. A poor-farm is not necessarily a poor farm. A glass house is different from a glass-house, a green house from a green-house. And out in the country, says a humorist, people distinguish between a near neighbor and a near-neighbor.

The reader is well aware that Trump did not literally come out of the gate itself. Also, the reader knows you do not mean that Trump literally came through (out of) a gate. Thus the idiomatic interpretation is the only rational one to apply to the phrase as you used it.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board with emoticons of dancing guys and smiley faces flipping each other off. It makes it worse if it is something so petty as whether I should have hyphenated "out-of-the-gate". Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I think it's bad form to correct someone on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or typos on something as informal as a message board

"[Sic]" is not used to expressly correct someone. It's used to indicate that the writer quoting another's remarks is aware that there is something errant in the way the original author presented the remark and that the error is not the current writer's. I used it because I quoted your writing in my sentence rather than outside of it, such as by using a "quote box."

But for your challenging my use of "[sic]," I'd not have expounded upon my having used [sic], and I certainly wouldn't have bothered to explicitly note what was amiss that led me to use it. Had your point of contention been justified/accurate, I'd have simply "owned" my mistake and moved on, perhaps also offering a clarification of my meaning if such were warranted. (I've done so on more than one occasion. I'm well aware that my USMB posts often contain typos, sometimes a lot of them. Some I discover in time to correct them. Some I do not timely find. Of others, indeed many, I just don't give a damn because nothing I write for USMB has a bearing on how I'm judged by people whose opinion of me I value.)

Plus, you are wrong on top of that. "Out of the gate" with no hyphens is a prepositional phrase. I used it as an adjective: "a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president". Both "full throttle" and "out of the gate" take hyphens there and for the same reasons.

I really didn't think you'd genuinely want to go down that road; apparently, however, you do...

You'd be correct about the hyphenation but for "out of the gate" existing in English as an idiom. Were it not idiomatically understood to and accepted as having the temporal denotation you note you intended, I would agree with you. (In which case I'd also not have used "[sic].") I provided the first reference link in post 298 to illustrate the phrase's acceptance as an idiom unto itself.

BTW, "out of the gate" is strictly speaking an adverbial prepositional phrase, although some might call it an adverbial phrase. The "adverbial" aspect accrues from the phrase's temporal quality, "when" being a piece of meaning adverbs convey. "Out of the gate" identifies when an action took place, which not a function of adjectives. Thus, though you think you used the phrase as an adjective, you did not because adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs, thus adverbial phrases, can modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.



Note:

• Why am I indulging this discussion line? Because I suspect that 300+ posts in, there's little or nothing of note to add to the substance of the thread topic, so I'm willing to engage on this marginally amusing line. If you think there is, however, thematically relevant ground left uncovered with regard to your thread topic, I'll drop this line of chit chat.

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

I almost was willing to concede the adjectival use of "out of the gate" but for one thing: the phrase is inherently a temporal one. That is to say it identifies when the "full-throttle attempt" commenced; thus the phrase is necessarily adverbial. Adverbs (adverbial phrases) identify, along with "how" and "where," "when" with regard to the word/phrase they modify. Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Your explanation above of your intended meaning further solidified my conviction of the adverbial use rather than a possibly adjectival use of the idiom; you explicitly note the temporal aspect by indicating your meaning as "immediately on day one." That's a temporal attribute -- "immediately" and "on day one" are both indicators of time, of when -- not qualitative indications of nature or extent, which is what adjectives indicate. Plus, "immediately" is clearly an adverb.

Given your having stated that you want "out of the box" to modify "attempt," I suspect that you intended denotation for that phrase is "immediate attempt." (One can reverse the order of those two words if one seeks a deliberately so-called "poetic" construction, but doing so wouldn't alter the meaning.) What you wrote, however, is denotatively and grammatically equivalent to "immediately naked."

Why? Because, as and for the reasons discussed above, "out of the box" is adverbial, and the hyphen (because the phrase is an accepted idiom) doesn't change it to adjectival. Because "out of the box" is adverbial, it cannot modify a noun, and because it cannot, it must modify either an adjective, verb or other adverb. For the sentence in question, the only real choices are "naked" and "full-throttle," not "Trump." (I never thought "Trump," or an action performed by Trump, was what was that phrase modifies.)

That means, then, that one must determine which of those adjectives the phrase modifies. You separated "full-throttle" and "out of the box" with commas, so that may tell us. Now, I could walk through the various types of commas and what they'd mean, but the reality is that I don't have enough information about what you intended to know without a doubt whether you'd sooner have "out of the box" modify "full-throttle" or "naked." Accordingly, I'm going to move on to my last point, which, with any luck, will make clear why I opted not to discuss commas and the meaning their appearance conveys. Were I to guess, I'd say it's "naked" that you would prefer to modify.

Lastly -- and this gets into abstruse grammar points that make a huge difference and that most people ignore, never learned, or forgot -- there are a few ways to achieve the adjectival meaning you say you intended. The ways to do that are:

• Connect "naked" to "out of the box" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival and uses the serial comma to indicate that "full-throttle" and "out-of-the-box-naked" both modify "attempt." This is an contrivedly sophisticated way to do it, but it gets the job done in a way that doesn't create ambiguity, which, here, is all it needs to do. After all, you're not writing for a paying audience or to boost your prosaic renown.
• Use "and" --> Writing "There has never been a full-throttle and out-of-the-box-naked attempt by the press..." transforms the prepositional phrase from its intrinsic adverbial nature to adjectival.
• Change the sentence to a stronger, more active construction --> This solution, though it doesn't produce an adjectival phrase, is the one I'd choose. I would because doing so inherently solves the problem by using "attempt" as a verb, which, for your sentence (intended meaning), is the best choice. Changing the sentence to a more active construction, one might write the following:
  
  -- "The press has never before and from day one nakedly attempted full throttle to bring down a president."
  
  I suspect that sentence's meaning is what you had in mind when you constructed the passive voice one you posted:
  
  -- "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  
• Use "attempt to" rather than "attempt by" --> This approach produces the type of construction I suspect you had in mind. I don't prefer it to the one immediately above, but it works and lacks ambiguity.
  
  -- "There has never been an unabashedly full-throttle, out of the gate media attempt to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."
  
  The problem with the original sentence comes from "attempt." That word, and words like it, are best used as verbs if one is going to use them in a quasi-passive construction, i.e, following them with "by so and so" rather than with "to," such as "...in an attempt to [whatever]." The reason is that they inherently denote movement, motion, action, so when they are used as nouns in a near-passive formulation, it takes great skill to keep unambiguous the sentence containing them. Even having great skill, it's very easy to make a simple mistake that leads to the type of confusion we've been discussing.
  
  I realize you, the author, aren't confused because you know what meaning was in your mind as you penned the sentence. Careful readers are the ones confused. Fortunately for your sentence, the confusion is minor and has, or for me had, little impact on the reader's ability to comprehend you. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, all the ways one might reasonably construe the sentence amount to essentially the same things. The differences in meaning could, at best, only result in quibbling.

FWIW, were I still teaching, the overall weak grammatical construction of the original sentence -- the ambiguity accruing from the adverbial phrase and the passive voice are what make it weak; the idea itself is not grammatically weak -- is what I'd note and, depending on how many weak sentences appeared in the document and the overall, i.e., absent grammatical weaknesses, quality of the writer's ideas and their development, I might deduct a few points (between two and five) from the assignment.

I did that for several reasons:

• I was a teaching assistant at one of the nation's most elite schools. Students were presumed upon admission to have mastered and without exception apply all the fine points of English grammar, and by the time the got to my class, they also were expected, furthermore, to have mastered and without fail apply the nuances of collegiate composition. Whether one had or had not was beside the point; the expectation, thus grading criterion, was there. I didn't have a choice. Students could always go to my supervising professor to appeal the grade I assigned, and if he observed that I had gone easy on the grammar expectation, that'd have been a demerit against me.
• It provided me and my supervising professor with a small measure of what he called "magister's" discretion. That came into play at the end of the term. If I had students who'd made themselves and their efforts and knowledge keenly aware to me, if I felt they deserved a break and they'd lost a few grammar points, I could push them up a point or two if doing so got them to the next grade. Mind you, there were plenty of students about whom I knew to nothing beyond what they turned in. I didn't push them anywhere unless the curve forced my prof, thus me, to do so.
• Most students were pretty sharp. If I didn't take off points for grammar, I'd have had too many students earning the same grade, even though they weren't at the same overall level of academic mastery. The reality is that mastery of English counts outside of English class. Ditto math, but that didn't much come into play in the classes I taught; the math wasn't hard or convoluted.

I-give-you an "E" for Effort, but I'm un-budged. They're is a "stackexchange' community for English-I-visit sometimes we could submit the question their and see what they come up with: They also-give-points-for-good-answers and that sort of thing and given "the amount of time" you spent on you're answers, you should at least be getting points-for-them.

Feel free to submit the matter there. This is the only Internet group of sorts to which I have any will to participate. Feel free, if it suits you, to submit yours and my remarks.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Sure they do: An early meeting.

• Adjectives and Adverbs

 

[dblack]

Donald Trump was elected by the people of the United States to a four year term. He is the person we chose to execute the laws of our Republic. We chose ...

Fuck him and idiot who voted for him. I ain't playin'.

 

[dblack]

View attachment 140010

I hate Trump. Never voted for Obama. Try again.

 

[dblack]

Haven't you heard? We're not a democracy.

That's what I thought when I read the thread title . "'Trump haters making democracy impossible' ... ahh.. a bit of good news for a change."

 

[cnelsen]

Haven't you heard? We're not a democracy.

That's what I thought when I read the thread title . "'Trump haters making democracy impossible' ... ahh.. a bit of good news for a change."

How about this,l then: Trump-haters making a continued existence as the United States impossible.

 

[cnelsen]

Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Sure they do: An early meeting.

• Adjectives and Adverbs

In the sentence, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow." do you claim the word "early" is not an adjective? that it has the same function as the word "early" in this sentence, "They decided early in the meeting."