From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Fri Aug 08 2003 - 16:13:24 MDT
On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 12:07 PM, Ramez Naam wrote:
> From: Brett Paatsch [mailto:bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au]
>> "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the
>> United States, at the time of the adoption of this
>> Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President;
> Arnold can not become president of the US without a constitutional
> change. What's confusing you is the comma between "citizen of the
> United States" and "at the time of the adoption of this Constitution".
> That comma is an anachronism. If the phrase were rewritten today it
> wouldn't be there.
Well, it wouldn't if the meaning were as commonly taught, but then,
why is it there at all? What need was there to interrupt the
phrase "a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption
of this Constitution" with a comma? I wouldn't expect this to be
similar to the case of the meaning of "regulated" having changed
over the years, since I'm not aware of any other purpose for commas
than to clarify the separation of concepts in a case like this. :)
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> "Not only can money buy happiness, it isn't even particularly expensive any more." -- Spike Jones
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