After watching Stephen Colbert skewer Mitt Romney for his use of the word "sport" instead of "sports," I propose a new Constitutional amendment: All persons running for President of the United States must demonstrate idiomatic use of the language.
If you missed Colbert's report this week, he showed a clip where Romney describes having met a tall man, "a great big guy, seven feet tall. . . And he started a business. Of course you know it was in basketball. But it wasn't in basketball! I mean, I figured he had to be in sport, but he wasn't in sport." Since when does anyone speak like this? Not since the mid-20th century, according to Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, who notes also that Mitt used this anachronistic expression repeatedly in his 2004 book Turnaround.
What are we to make of Mitt? Is he a bad sport or a bad sports?
Or more to the point, can he speak our language?
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