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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how "In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's." is an example of this. To me, that unambiguously parses like this:

   peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrBushsAdsNegative).length() > peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrKerrysAdsNegative).length()

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Good question. I followed the citation in wikipedia and it points to this article: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1997 In the comment thread there, people are discussing the question you raise.

Essentially, it's the inclusion of the word "they" which makes the sentence incorrect. If the word "they" was removed it would be valid and would mean what you read it as.

'More people' needs to be compared to a differenet group but the use of 'they' means the 'more people' are being compared to themselves.

And, for me (non-native and barely-speaker), comments like yours raise the real point: it seems that the "problem" is kind of nitpicking the words of the sentence. People just listen-and-correct (or read-and-correct) considering that there was good faith from the author, not that it was created to be non-parseable.

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