Yesterday, I wrote about the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and KDKA-TV, who were quick to distance themselves from a sports reporter who said that it was a bad thing that abusing animals was considered more serious than raping a woman. Sure, his phrasing left something to be desired, but the Post-Gazette and KDKA rushed to apologize and insist that they didn’t agree with him, apparently without actually parsing the sentence to determine what it was they were actually disagreeing with.

Today, I’d like to look at a piece by Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times. Brownstein takes offense at Bush’s protest against the SCHIP. (If you’d care for a more indepth look at what Brownstein says, see Patterico’s post on the topic; I’m only focusing on one sentence.)

In that opinion piece, Brownstein wrote: “In fact, Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance.”

According to Brownstein’s sentence, what is congress trying to remove? A blot. What is that blot? 8 million children. Yes, he modifies the noun “children” with a prepositional phrase that tells us which children Congress is trying to remove, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s saying that Congress wants to “remove” (by killing? Deporting? The sentence isn’t clear) 8 million children!

Of course, that’s absurd. What he means is that Congress is trying to find a way to give these children some form of health insurance, thus removing the condition of being uninsured from the children, but that isn’t what he said.

Something I’ve heard from time to time (usually from a conservative commentator, lamenting the fact that a liberal has hijacked a word to mean something it doesn’t) is that “Words mean things.” Similarly, sentences mean things, and it bothers me that people who ostensibly write sentences for a living don’t seem to grasp that concept.