Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jul 21, 2014 22:54:10 GMT 5.5
...all the debate over Klein's veracity has overshadowed the importance of Hillary apparently calling Barack Obama a "motherfucker", which is problematic.
But because you could – and many have – nitpick Hillary's "quote" to make a point about Klein writing his books from within an Imaginarium, the American public has overlooked Klein's point, which is that Hillary is bad.
But because you could – and many have – nitpick Hillary's "quote" to make a point about Klein writing his books from within an Imaginarium, the American public has overlooked Klein's point, which is that Hillary is bad.
The constructions of the type highlighted are quite common and regarded ti be acceptable by some, but they are grammatically incorrect. The modal verb "could" requires a verb in its base form
could nitpick
while the perfective primary auxiliary requires a verb in its past participle form following it. "Nitpick", therefore, cannot be the common nonfinite verb of "could" and "have".
have nitpicked
To avoid this error, the appropriate part of, or the whole of, the sentence needs to be rephrased. One way to do this is to rephrase the part of the sentence like this:
because you could nitpick – and many have done so– Hillary's "quote"