Super Military Mind Gary Johnson: What's a Leppo?

Asked what he would do about Aleppo, the smoothly baked Libertarian pothound answered "What's a leppo?"

He now says he was "thinking about an acronym:"

Yes, very "refreshingly human" -- guy humiliates himself on TV then makes up excuses why that's not so bad and then asserts he knows all the important stuff. Why I've never seen a politician run that play after a gaffe!

Just his human honesty coming through, must be!

The reason I rendered it as "a leppo" is that this seemed to me off the bat a case of mistaken parsing; word confusion happens when a hearer doesn't link and sequence words and sounds in the way intended by the speaker. See Garden Path sentence for some fun examples of easily-misparsed sentences, like "The old man the boat."

That's a grammatically perfect sentence, with no errors and no omitted punctuation; if you're not getting it, you're misparsing it.

Anyway, so the sound "a" is usually an article preceding a singluar noun. I figured Johnson heard it as "a leppo," and got confused, as brains fumigated under striped canvas tents with pot smoke tend to get. He now says he was thinking of an acronym, though, stonerishly, fails to tell us what acronym he was confusing Aleppo with.

But that doesn't really get him off the hook, because parsing errors occur when the brain attempts to apply general rules of parsing to new words, sounds, and sentences.

Someone for whom "Aleppo" is part of their active vocabulary, part of their daily reading, is unlikely to misparse it as "a leppo."

So this is the guy some NeverTrumpers are flocking to because they find Trump to be too unserious on military policy. Okey doke!

Funny little thing: The geniuses at the New York Times, who like totally know what A leppo is, first said that "Aleppo is the capital of ISIS." No, Raqqa is the capital of the Islamic State.

Then they corrected, to say that actually Aleppo is the capital of Syria itself.

Um, no.

So their article about this stoner goof and his stoned stupidities features this double correction at its end:

posted by Ace at 12:37 PM

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