IS THIS WATCHTOWER PARAGRAPH GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT?

badboy

WT MARCH 1 2009 page 3

The ancient Babylonians,for example, believed that human affairs are influenced by the stars and their movements.

should `are' be `were'?

DT

I believe it's correct. The Watchtower Society is lousy with numbers and math, but it tends to do pretty well with grammer.

Elsewhere

The paragraph is correct.

The "are" is used since the subject is the "stars" (present), not "ancient Babylonians" (past tense).

Isn't is crazy? It seems that spelling and grammar are the only subjects that the Watchtower Society has mastered. Of course, they have a lot of cheap labor. They can review an article a hundred times if they want to, just as long as the information isn't questioned. Has anybody run across any grammatical or spelling errors in the Watchtower literature?

cameo-d

Watchtower never makes grammatical errors. Never.

The wording here is intended to open the door to introducing more occult influence. As you may have noticed from the new CD (thread posted here somewhere) there is subtle artwork referencing the zodiac.

No, there is no mistake. The sentence was not meant to be past tense. It is present tense.

Doctrinal changes are very subtle and more are on the way..

darkl1ght3r

No I think that's correct. Can't give you a "technical" explanation why, but it's got to do with the fact that human affairs are ongoing, then and now.

Yeah, they very very rarely make mistakes. I remeber I found a legitimate one when I was a teenager and my mom tried to argue with me but I looked it up and i was right, and then my mom got mad at me for pointing it out. I wasn't "doubting" what they wrote, and she still got mad at me. Rrrrgh.

Amazing

Badboy,

Elsewhere nailed it. The sentence is grammatically and syntactically correct.

Cameo-d,

Watchtower never makes grammatical errors. Never.

It is not technically correct to say 'never.' In my forty years reading the publications in great detail, I have found a few errors that made it to print ... some were typographical, and some were grammatical, a few spelling errors, and of course the always famous factual errors which we all know and love. But, your main point is basically correct ... the Society at least does as good a job or better than the average newspaper in making very few errors.

straightshooter

I agree that the WTS is grammatically correct, even though I am poor at being grammatically correct in my sentences.

Once I thought in an audio reading of the Watchtower on a WTS cassette that the reader pronounced "long-lived" incorrectly. I was so proud that I thought I caught them pronouncing words incorrectly. But after research the word could be pronounced in various ways that I did not know.

stillin

the correct grammar was one of the things that attracted me. It helps to separate the wheat from the chaff. (ops, "chaff"?)

IS THIS WATCHTOWER PARAGRAPH GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT?

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