The South Dakota 6: Teenage baseball team players. They said it was hazing. Prosecutor says rape

[Igel]

12. You know, given the state of English grammar,

"The Pennington County State's Attorney's Office reiterated that additional charges may be on the horizon for adults associated with the team who had knowledge of and failed to report the crimes" is a bit iffy.

If they knew, there'd be no question. That there's a question lets the question dribble on down to, "Did they know?"

Key word: "May." Entirely equivalent to "it says it's possible nobody else knew." In which case, the pandit would say, "I'm surprised nobody else knew." "Wonder if they were coaches" and "I'm surprised" at this stage are equally likely, assuming nothing else.

Ivan IV's letters have the same grammatical weirdness in Russian--hard to read, on many accounts, there you go. The culture and literary language, in flux, left open exactly what a not-fully-literate (in the official language) potentate (like we've never experienced dat) mean actually meant. I had a paper to write that explored what the grammatical breakdown meant and what the regularities were in order to write a "grammar" of Ivan IV's Russian, but early on I realized that uncertainty about what the "norms" were as the norms shifted or were in flux accounted for things adequately for the apparent randomness. Over a decade or more, the changes *were* random. I couldn't say that--it violated the prof's required assumptions from the 1950s--so the grade lapsed from I to F. (Thanks, [ din ]). (I'm a Slavist teaching AP HS science. WTH?)