Hello, Sir Joe,
I always read the Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day everyday online but I am being confused with its example sentence today for the usage of the word "spurious." It says, "Reid’s claim that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle sounded spurious to me, and I didn't believe it until he showed me a photo of his grandfather alongside the legendary slugger."
Isn't should be, "Reid claims or claimed that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle sounded spurious to me, and I didn't believe it until he showed me a photo of his grandfather alongside the legendary slugger?."
Thanks indeed, Sir Joe.
Reagan
The example given by
Merriam-Webster’s is the correct construction: “Reid’s claim that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle sounded spurious to me, and I didn’t believe it until he showed me a photo of his grandfather alongside the legendary slugger.” The subject of the first clause of that sentence is actually the whole noun phrase “Reid’s claim that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle,” and it forms an independent clause together with the predicate “sounded spurious to me.”
That first clause in
Merriam-Webster’s example can be very confusing because it consists of the possessive form “Reid’s claim” followed by the relative clause “that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle” functioning as modifier of the noun “claim.” If we disregard that relative clause, the first clause would boil down to “Reid’s claim sounded spurious to me,” which is what that clause is basically without the modifier. (How I wish
Merriam-Webster’s didn’t use such complicated, mind-twisting examples for its word definitions! Indeed, such examples sometimes make the “Word of the Day” itself easier to understand without examples.)
Now, as to your proposed version for the first clause of that sentence, “Reid claims or claimed that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle sounded spurious to me,” it’s actually a defective construction—a run-on sentence. This is because it has two operative verbs, “claims” (or “claimed”) and “sounded,” in two clauses that are not properly punctuated or linked. The first of those clauses is “Reid claims or claimed that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle,” and the other is “Mickey Mantle sounded spurious to me.”
One way to make the first clause of your version work properly is to revise it as follows: “Reid claimed that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle, but that claim sounded spurious to me.” Here, we used the coordinating conjunction “but” to link the two clauses that you had inadvertently disjointed. Then, now that we have fixed the problematic first clause by making it two clauses linked by “but,” we can link it to the second clause of the original sentence as follows:
“Reid claimed that his grandfather was friends with Mickey Mantle, but that claim sounded spurious to me and I didn't believe it until he showed me a photo of his grandfather alongside the legendary slugger.”
What we have here now is a compound sentence with three independent clauses properly linked by the coordinating conjunctions “but” and “and.”
I hope that this rather long explanation has clarified the matter for you.
