Fail. In an utterance like “That ‘that’ is a rad word”, the second ‘that’ is not USED, it is MENTIONED. There’s a hyuuge difference grammatically; mentioned words (hypostases) are all grammatically nouns. And they have to be excluded from grammatical analysis: “In a grammatical English utterance, ‘the’ is never followed immediately by a verb” would be self-contradictory if one allowed the hypostatic “the” to be subject to the rule.
There are some rad concatenations of mentioned words, as in: “Tom, where Betty had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ had had the teacher’s approval.”
Ida No about 6 years ago
Yeah, “that.”
scyphi26 about 6 years ago
T’s right, it is grammatical…technically. That doesn’t mean it’s good prose.
AndrewSihler about 6 years ago
Fail. In an utterance like “That ‘that’ is a rad word”, the second ‘that’ is not USED, it is MENTIONED. There’s a hyuuge difference grammatically; mentioned words (hypostases) are all grammatically nouns. And they have to be excluded from grammatical analysis: “In a grammatical English utterance, ‘the’ is never followed immediately by a verb” would be self-contradictory if one allowed the hypostatic “the” to be subject to the rule.
There are some rad concatenations of mentioned words, as in: “Tom, where Betty had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ had had the teacher’s approval.”