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Friday, August 17, 2012

Hey, Mensa, you’re fuckin’ retarded

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I am quoting from this URL of the Mensa website:
“There are Mensans for whom Mensa provides a sense of family, and others for whom it is a casual social activity.”
This is one of the most fucked grammatical constructions my poor 95 IQ brain has ever encountered.

It’s easier to analyze this convoluted sentence if the “for” prepositions are placed at the end of the relative clauses, where they would normally appear in informal speech:
There are Mensans whom Mensa provides a sense of family for, and others whom it is a casual social activity for.
I have highlighted the two relative clauses. Now that I have identified the relative clauses, I can pluck them out of the sentence without harming the structure of the sentence. Removing the relative clauses reveals that this is an incomplete sentence:
There are Mensans, and others.
Since “and” is preceded by a comma, it indicates that it is a coordinating conjunction.

The clause after the coordinating conjunction has no verb, only the subject “others.” In addition, “others” refers to non-Mensans, which is not what these einsteins intended.

There are significant problems with the writing on the Mensa website. I fear the day when the Mensans breed a super race of people with high IQs. The linguistic atrocities committed by this race of intellectual giants will surely bring about a language apocalypse.

(Original Mensa source.)

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