You’re absolutely right! I’ve done some back-checking and it does look like Reuters, the international news agency, had goofed grammatically in this lead sentence of their news dispatch from San Francisco datelined July 15, 2011 (underscoring mine):
SAN FRANCISCO - The Obama administration asked a U.S. appeals court to reconsider an order that requires the immediate end to a policy preventing gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, according to a court filing.
As with several other news outlets in various parts of the world, GMA News Online simply carried the grammatically flawed Reuters news dispatch verbatim. We therefore can’t fault our friends in GMA News Online for that flaw, as it’s my understanding that unless the error in a syndicated news dispatch is grievously or ruinously wrong, news outlets are not at liberty to make unilateral changes in grammar and fact in that news dispatch. Of course, they have the alternative of rewriting the whole story to fix the error and just attribute it to the news agency as source, but that would be so much trouble in the white-hot grind of daily journalism.
So precisely what’s the grammar error in that lead sentence? The adverb “openly” is a misplaced modifier—shall we call it a “loose cannon”?—in that sentence. It’s wrongly modifying the verb “serving” when it should be modifying “gays and lesbians” instead. The absurd impression created by this grammatical error is that under the court order being appealed, gays and lesbians can only work in clandestine or covert operations while serving in the US military. Obviously, though, the intended meaning is that “openly gay individuals” and “openly lesbian individuals” shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the US military—the meaning expressed accurately by your proposed rewrite that I’m repeating below (underscoring mine):
“The Obama administration asked a U.S. appeals court to reconsider an order that requires the immediate end to
a policy preventing openly gay and openly lesbian persons from serving in the military, according to a court filing.”
Now, an interesting corollary question is why Reuters would make that big grammar mistake in such a socially and politically sensitive news story involving the third sex. I think it’s because the Reuters reporter (and presumably also the Reuters desk editors) decided—and rightly so—that the phrases “openly gays” and “openly lesbians” would be grammatically wrong following the rule that an adverb can’t modify a noun. Indeed, by definition, an adverb typically serves “as a modifier of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence.” In the phrases “openly gays” and “openly lesbians,” however, the words “gays” and “lesbians” would be obviously nouns in the plural form, so those phrases would be grammatically anomalous. The Reuters guys obviously didn’t want to be caught committing this basic error in English grammar, but in the process of avoiding it, they misplaced the adverb “openly” and made their lead sentence jump from the frying pan to the fire.
Your proposed reconstruction of their sentence neatly solved the problem, of course. With the noun “persons” added to those problematic phrases, they are now scrupulously correct as follows: “openly gay persons” and “openly lesbian persons.” This time the operative nouns are “persons” in each case, correctly modified by the adjectives “gay” and “lesbian,” respectively, which in turn are both modified by the adverb “openly.”
Well done, Menie!
As to Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda’s repeated use of the phrase “testimonies provided for in court,” you are correct in your observation that his use of the preposition “for” is grammatically faulty. I would even venture to suggest that his use of the verb “provide” is also grammatically off-key in that context; I would have used the plainer and more semantically accurate “given” and simply said “testimonies given in court.” At any rate, Menie, I think we have to be more forgiving of the grammar of high-level spokespersons in situations like that. From personal experience, I know that getting peppered with so many questions amid all those TV and digital cameras and flashing lights can be very distracting indeed!
