Making the rounds today is Ed Whelan’s post contrasting Judge Sotomayor’s comments in which she chides the legal community for its lack of Strunk ’N’ Whiteness with a speech of hers making a crashing grammatical category error.

Go back and read a couple of basic grammar books. Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Versus:

When my first mid-term paper came back to me my first semester, I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish, we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition, a cotton shirt in Spanish is a shirt of cotton, una camisa de agodon, no agondon camisa.

This guy notes that not only does she (or perhaps the transcriptionist?) get the Spanish word for cotton (algodón) wrong, it’s risible to suggest that Spanish has no adjectives. ¿Grande? ¿Loco? We use that same prepositional genitive in English all the time. “Shirt of cotton” is awkward but not incorrect. Nor is “Field of Cloth of Gold,” “house of cards,” or—a phrase that I suspect Judge Sotomayor has used once or twice—“person of color.”

But what your Volgi hasn’t seen mentioned is the fact that in the example given, Judge Sotomayor gets the English grammar wrong. She obviously doesn’t recognize that cotton isn’t an adjective at all. It’s an attributive noun. Just because it comes before another noun doesn’t change its part of speech.

Having read his share of legal texts in his day, your Œc. Vol., is completely sympathetic to Judge Sotomayor’s attempt to shame lawyers into lucid, grammatical prose. However, her foolish attempt to generate Mystical Latina Otherness is bogus, pedestrian multicultural crap—as well as poor grammar.

And your Volgi doesn’t cotton to that.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.