Let us run (far away)

Tuesday is a local election for city council—which ordinarily would not be that big a deal, but given that this is the 37th largest city in the entire country, it is turning into a heated campaign.

Well, if nothing else, I've received more pieces of mail about it than I would expect for such a contest.

The Democratic candidate impugns the Republican candidate by noting the latter campaigned for George W. Bush. The Republican candidate impugns the Democratic candidate by noting the latter previously used his influence in the city attorney's office to help get the liquor license reinstated for a strip club. So it seems to come down to a crony for quite possibly the most blithely idiotic man to hold the Oval Office or a smut supporter of possibly questionable integrity. Quite a delightful choice to make.

So to select which is the lesser of these two proverbial evils I may have to use another criterion—one particular to what's important to me. On what I've received in the mail, which candidate's literature included the fewest egregious typographical errors?

On a flier (printed in full-color on heavy cardstock, with photo-quality graphics) for the Republican, the text features the phrase "...lets remind him…" (see photo below).

And if you didn't catch it, the mistake there is in the first word I quoted: lets. That is a conjugated form of the verb "to let"; the correct usage would be something like: "Dad always lets me go to the movies with my friends."

Presumably what they meant was "...let's remind…"—the contraction of "let us" (and thus requiring the apostrophe); without that punctuation the sentence has no subject (not even an implicit one).

Not that it's a primary distinguishing characteristic, but to select between two potentially undesirable (albeit in different ways) candidates, I suppose I would prefer the one who has someone on staff who can proofread and catch the distinction between lets and let's.

Of course, that assumes I would vote for either one at all. There is that choice as well; both fail to mention five others are also on the ballot.

It does seem like voting for either one tacitly supports the use of such I'm-not-as-bad-as-the-other-guy tactics, where one is not so much voting for that candidate but voting against his opponent. While that be all we have, it stands to reason that if that's what wins it is only reinforced, and therefore it is what we continue to get.

Let's see if we can cease to make that worthwhile, so that no candidate lets his staff (or consultants, or whomever they hire for preparing such messages) follow this pattern again.

We may just alleviate some typos in the process.

Yes we can.

~

Yes, I let slide the whole capitalization of "Advocacy of Adult Clubs" (as though that was the name of an organization); let's give them the benefit of ever-so-slight doubt that doing so was intended to accentuate.