Saturday, February 15, 2014

"That" deletion, or is oxforddictionaries.com wrong?

Oxforddictionaries.com have given the following title to one of their articles:




Nine words you didn't know had offensive origins



Of course, I'm not in a position to question the competence of the editors, and the title of the post is a mere provocation, but... can someone, please, parse it for me? IMHO the sentence in full is:



The nine words that, you didn't know, had offensive origins



The "you didn't..." part would be then a non restrictive clause and it could be omitted, and the "that" would not be a conjunction between "words" and "you" but between "words" and "had". Therfore, it shouldn't have been omitted. Right?...



(Funny thing, though. If I were to say it myself without giving it too much thought, I'd of course go with "Nine words you didn't know had offensive origins", because it just sounds right to me. But the question is - isn't the accepted usage in this case grammatically "flawed" in a way?

No comments:

Post a Comment