PUMA began life as an acronym for Party Unity My Ass. The "clean" version is People United Means Action. Shouldn't that be "People United Mean Action"? I was under the impression that people is a plural noun. Perhaps we should come up with a new phrase...?
4 comments:
I can see both as being correct. Your version refers to only the people.
I can see it as a united group of people, and the fact that they are united means there's going to be action: "poeple, united" means action.
Personally, I like the non-cleaned up version better - Party Unity My Ass. It gets right to the heart of the matter and is in-your-face defiant. I'm sure Murphy cleaned it up expecting that it might get more news coverage that way. But actually, the opposite seems to be happening. Yesterday, Wolf Blitzer had a reporter repeat "party unity my ass" twice on the air. MSNBC and Fox just bleeped out the "ass" part, but made it pretty clear what it stood for. Since the MSM has become no better than the tabloid news, I would bet they love the naughty version and will cover us much more just because of the name. So be it.
Which do you prefer: Youth In Politics means Yippies or Youth In Politics mean Yippies? The Bible has "The wages of sin is death" (translating 'stipendium peccati mors est'). 'Means' in the acronym is a linking verb, so the apparent subject and predicate can be inverted and still make the identical sense: Action Means People United. Look, you're dealing with a language whose longest one-syllable words are 'stretched' and 'scrunched'.
Dimitri
If it's people; It should be People United Mean Action
If it's party; Party United Means Action
PUMA or Party Unity My Ass was a bad way to start. It delegitimized the meaning.
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