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It was more amusing than disheartening, I think, but nevertheless it happened: Obama's first words as President were lost in a linguistic burp. Deemed 'The Flub Heard Round The World' by the Associated Press, Chief Justice "Roberts got the words of the [swearing-in] oath a little off, which prompted Obama to do so, too."

Great. So our President and Chief Justice feed off each other's mistakes. It's...just...like...here it comes...it's gonna be a bad joke...just like the Bush Presidency! <Sounds of crowd groaning>  What's kind of funny, in that now-that-it's-over-we-can-laugh-about-it way, is that if this had happened during Bush's inauguration ceremony, the blunder totally would have been a harbinger of speeches yet to come.

The mistake centered on the placement of a pesky little adverb: Faithfully. The oath, as written in our Constitution reads, "I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States." Roberts moved the adverb in question to the end of the phrase. Obama started to repeat what the Chief Justice had said, then stopped. Roberts, sensing something was amiss, re-uttered his line, this time correctly placing the adverb correctly. Obama proceeded, but ended up accidentally using Roberts' initial foible accidentally.

(Also retrospectively ironic: couldn't one say that Bush did indeed 'Faithfully execute the office of president of the United States' with a pun-emphasis on 'Faith'?...Or a pun-emphasis on execute? Heyo!)

I first formally learned about adverbs and their function in the English lexicon during my junior year of high school, in French class. "You'll never learn French if you don't even know your own language," our teacher said. To this day, she remains the best English teacher I've had. We spent two weeks at the beginning of the fall semester learning about modifiers and the objects and indirect objects and verbs that they modified. Of course I already possessed an innate sense of the English language at that point, and these lessons merely put definitions to concepts I already understood, because I'm so smart, as evidenced by my very thick, very tortoiseshell glasses.

Drawing upon this great wealth of knowledge of mine, though, which I have, it would seem that even when taking the creative linguistic liberties to which Chief Justice Roberts apparently felt he was entitled, the meaning of the sentence doesn't change one bit. In fact, I think a third placement of 'faithfully' directly after 'execute' would yield the same meaning. Still, out of 'an abundance of caution,' Obama and his team decided that he should take the oath again so as to parrot the Constitution's exact wording.

This is why I love the Constitution - like the rest of American life, it's absolutely absurd sometimes. As far as interpreting the text goes, it can get pretty nasty. Did someone say 'second amendment'? I guess I'm all for pomp and ceremony, and I'm often that annoying stickler correcting your whos and whoms, but it seems a little ridiculous to take a mulligan on an entire oath because of a misplaced - if not misused - modifier. It's not like Obama or Roberts inverted his wedding vows from "I do," to "Do I?" But it is nice to know this is an administration willing to admit its mistakes - and correct them. Maybe this tendency will even carry over from wordplay to actual policy.

Addendum: This article/essay/blog post/rant is basically over. There's just one other area of ridiculousness I kind of want to address. Did anyone read anything in the last week about how Important it was that Roberts was the Chief Justice swearing in Obama, like because they're both post-Vietnam adults who had vastly dissimilar upbringings that led them to the same place, and they Represent some sort of generational shift in politics. Like this article? It all seemed to me like when ESPN tries to hype up a game-day match-up as if it's some sort of generations-old rivalry: The Cardinals and Steelers have been bitter rivals ever since winter was invented and Arizona - Prometheus-like - began to steal several rays of distinctly Pennsylvanian sunshine; Ben Roethlisberger and his Steel Curtain want revenge. Yow.