"fact" again

[Mark Mandel]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 1:38 PM, <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:

> The sentence is just some kind of awkward syntactic blend. I think
> "fact"=20
> merely means "fact." The meaning is just, '... had not ruled out [it being
> a=
> ]=20
> fact that the ads were fake."
>
> Compare:
>
> ... police had not ruled out [it being] the prince that had spiked the
> punch=
>

The deletion isn't parallel, and your example can't be misunderstood in
anything like the way the BBC sentence can.

--
Mark Mandel

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