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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Criminal Sentence 399: That's a Lie

From a book I'm reading (about Cro-Magnons):

"The ancestry of both the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lie with much earlier peoples."

Hmmm. Take away the prepositional phrase ("of both the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens") and the error is obvious: "The ancestry ... lie..."

As I said in the title, that's a lie ("lies")!

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