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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Criminal Sentence 291: From It That (Yep, You Read It Right)

And now for something completely ungrammatical, from a newspaper article about how DNA in a leech helped solve a crime in Australia:

"Detectives found the leech at the crime scene and extracted blood from it that they believed was from one of the two suspects."

Yep. The words "from it that" are not allowed in English. They just don't make sense in that order.

If we want this sentence to make sense, let's just move some words around:

"Detectives found the leech at the crime scene and extracted from it blood that they believed was from one of the two suspects."

I realize that this sounds a little stilted, so it's fine to delete the words "from it," since that is understood:

"Detectives found the leech at the crime scene and extracted blood that they believed was from one of the two suspects."

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