Naturally Jim Lovell was a dead ringer for Jim Lovell, but why Costner?

I wonder why this one wasn't picked to pieces, it's a wonderfully bad example for the grammarians

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Hang on...

Kevin Costner was the subject of Daryl's sentence, whereas Jim Lovell was the object. "Who" refers to the subject, "whom" to the object.

Gillian! We need you!

"Who", in that sentence, is the subject of the verb "was" (in "was almost a dead ringer").

Henrik's correct that the sentence, the way it is written, would be referring to Lovell as being a dead ringer for Lovell. There's a name for this type of grammatical error - "misplaced modifier" is coming to mind, but I don't think it's right.

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SeanF

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Nit picking of nit picks that have been nit picked

Pass the ibuprofen

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Dang it, can't a girl get some sleep without the Grammar Signal flashing?

In that sentence, "who" obviously refers to Jim Lovell. Quite right. Further, Sean, take a "correct grammatical term" prize. It is indeed a misplaced modifier. "Who, at least in 1994, was almost a dead ringer for Lovell" is intended to modify something else; ergo, modifier. It is intended to modify "Kevin Costner" (I don't care how much he resembled anybody; I can't take Kevin Costner--and Tom Hanks can act circles 'round him). However, since it is placed directly after "Jim Lovell," that is the phrase it modifies. Ergo, the sentence is wrong.

As to who/whom . . . the only rule of that I reliably remember well enough to explain it to anyone else is that "whom" always falls after a preposition. "To whom," for example. Putting it in the aforementioned sentence wouldn't change to whom (see?) the sentence referred. It just would've made the sentence even more wrong.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Quickly, Robin, to the GrammarCave!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I'm just wondering what the grammarmobile looks like, I like the idea of a grammarbelt though, not sure what you'd find in it, correction fluid presumably, not sure what else.

Naturally, you'd find whatever was needed to handle this episode's grammar crisis.

I know this because, in my other identity, I'm known as Alfred B.

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Does that thing I said about the frogmen doing "thumbs up" instead of "okay" in that other thread count? Because in diver school, they said to never use "thumbs up" in your everyday life or you might do it underwater, where it means something completely different.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Why, red pens and blue pencils, of course!

I don't possess a grammarmobile yet, but I'm working on it. And, yes, I will have a label made saying just that.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The title is his backhanded reference to how often it's been mis-attributed to him. He never said it.

That said, a very brief search didn't turn it up. I have at least four candidates (in terms of a similarly brief memory search) for where this was explained: Kranz's book, Kraft's book, Moondust, or Apollo 13's commentary track with Jim Lovell. I suspect it's the latter.

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And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

I can't remember where either, but I've heard the same thing. Basically, Kranz didn't say it because it wasn't necessary to say anything like that. Everybody in the MOCR and backrooms would have taken that attitude as a given.

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Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Which sounds fine until you realise that his book was published several years after the movie was made.

This allows the possibility that the scriptwriters wrote it because it sounded good, it stuck in the memory, and Kranz liked it enough to use it for his own book.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

*snaps fingers* You know, it may well have been talked about on the movie commentary tracks. Either Jim Lovell's or Ron Howard's. I'm thinking it may have been Howard's track.

I'll figure this out yet.

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And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Yes, as far as I can see he only uses the phrase in the first chapter of his book to descrbe his work in retrospect. So maybe he did adopt it from the movie. Life immitating art.