0 comments Contributed by David Mansfield on 17 October 2006 at 11:39

A letter I received from Columbia Law School Admissions allows me to be both egotistical (Columbia sent me a letter!) and educational. Examine with me the opening paragraph:

Your name has been forwarded to us by the Candidate Referral Service of the Law School Data Assembly Service, in which you had earlier agreed to participate. On the basis of your performance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), you have been identified as a prospective law school applicant who, on that criterion, has demontrated a capability to contribute to and benefit from a legal education of the first order.
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0 comments Contributed by David Mansfield on 16 October 2006 at 10:43

One famous example of the instability of language is

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

Despite the similar sentence structure, "flies" changes from verb to noun, "like" changes from preposition to verb, and the opening word changes from noun ("time") to adjective ("fruit" as a kind of fly).

I bring this up only because there is a poster in the Peer Helper office - across the hall from the Writing Crew - that reads:

Are you making friends or drinking buddies?

The intent is clear - "drinking buddies" as a noun phrase contrasts with friends - but I find it more amusing to think of this sentence as parallelism, where "drinking" is a verb contrasting with "making."