This is a "sidebar" to my piece on electoral college voting process, "The Devil's in the Details: Electoral Surgery Required," published here in OEN a few days ago. The NYT piece alludes to grammarian who took a look at a contentious clause in the US code for counting electoral college votes -- specifically, a sentence there that is 275 words long, and, as she notes, has "contains 21 commas and two semicolons." Each one of these clauses represents a potential problem of interpretation. Here is the sentence:
NYT's good grammarian, Amy Lynn Hess, was flummoxed by the sentence, saw trouble brewing. I did, however, employ an AI app -- Sentence Diagrammer -- which started smoking and fritzing out before finally telling me: No can do, hombre. F*ck the sentence.