An Unparallel Compound

Whenever you have two (or more) of something in a sentence, they should share the same structure. For example, if you have a list, they should all be the same part of speech. Line items in bulleted lists should have the same structure. (I wrote about parallelism several times in the past. Look up “parallel” in the search box in the upper right corner.)

I’m not sure how this is wrong, but it’s wrong. The sentence has a compound direct object that doesn’t match itself:

This time around the threat is contained, but flight crews have detailed and practiced responses to more extreme problems.

Maybe it’s because the source is British. I Americanized the spelling.  https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nasa-international-space-station-leak-iss-latest-alarm-soyuz-module-a8514291.html

“Detailed” looks like an adjective (a detailed response), and “practiced” looks like a verb (they practiced responses). Not the same. Bad. Maybe “detailed” is a verb? What is the sense of detailing a response? Is “practiced” an adjective? What’s a practiced response? I think the sentence is just plain not well written.

They could fix this with a simpler sentence; for example:

This time around the threat is contained, but flight crews have practiced detailed responses to more extreme problems.

One verb, one direct object. Nice. 

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First, here’s the bad sentence:

Because it will be able to collect more light than any telescope every built, including light from the edge of the universe, the device will allow us to determine the distance of far-off objects from the Earth and their composition.

https://futurism.com/giant-magellan-telescope-construction/

(First, that “every” should be “ever.” This is a plain old typo, resulting from carelessness. Shame on the proofreader.)

The real mistake of writing in this sentence has to do with the phrase “their composition.” At first (careless) glance, it looks like a compound object of 
from,” which doesn’t make sense.

“Their composition” is part of a compound direct object of “determine.”

The sentence has two solutions:

• Put a comma after “Earth.” This separates “and their composition” from the prepositional phrase.
• Put “composition and” right before “distance.” That gives you “…determine the composition and distance of far-off objects…” Now put “far off” where it belongs, next to the preposition: “…determine the composition and distance of objects far off from the Earth.”

I prefer the second choice even though it’s more work. The sentence is smoother.

Oh. Here’s a picture of the telescope, scheduled to be completed in 2024.

I don’t run into correct whoms often, so I like to post them when I see one as good examples, The Lockhorns in this case.

The subject and verb are “you think,” which makes “whom” the direct object. Myself, I’d be a little more cheerful about that perfume ad…

He makes a good point about the comma, though. The construction with the comma is called “direct address.” Without the comma, it’s “direct object.”

Got if off of Facebook, and now I can’t find it to give credit.

Lots of Indo-European languages use inflectional endings on words to indicate how the words are used in the sentence. About all we have left of inflected nouns in English is the possessive case.

Now, when we have a direct object and an indirect object, you can usually tell which is which without an inflectional ending. So If I say,

Give the woman the ball.

We rely on word order to know that woman (indirect object, dative) is getting the ball (direct object, accusative). That’s easy when you have nice short sentences. Suppose the ball isn’t in the sentence:

Give the woman.

Sounds like something from a wedding ceremony. Now let’s add a man into the picture:

Give the woman the man.

A little harder. Who’s getting whom? Put a “to” in there:

Give the woman to the man—or—give to the woman the man.

We use a “to” to indicate the indirect object. An inflection would be something like -em for dative (indirect object) and -en for accusative (direct object). Then we could put the words in either order and our meaning would still be clear.

Give the womanen the manem.

Now we can see that he’s getting her! No need for “to.”

All this is a bit trivial with these nice short sentences. But what about a long sentence? Here’s one, from the book Listening In by Susan Landau, page 107:

When a user instructs her iPhone to update, the iPhone sends an Apple authorization server—directly or via iTunes—the device’s unique ID, hashes of the software the phone is requesting, and a random number.

Where did the iPhone get the server to be able to send it? Oh wait—the server is the indirect object; the ID and so on are being sent to the server. Not obvious until you wade through the sentence.

A dative inflectional ending on “server” would have been handy.