{"id":671,"date":"2020-09-09T22:56:20","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T02:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/?p=671"},"modified":"2020-09-09T22:59:21","modified_gmt":"2020-09-10T02:59:21","slug":"usage-note-line-of-succession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/?p=671","title":{"rendered":"Usage note: Line of succession"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I saw a blog comment today that referred to the Speaker of the House of Representatives as &#8220;third in line&#8221; for the presidency. No, the Speaker is <strong>second<\/strong> in line. The Vice President is first. The President is not &#8220;in line&#8221; at all. He is <strong>already<\/strong> President. You can&#8217;t be &#8220;in line&#8221; for an office you currently occupy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know why so many people get this wrong. Even <em>Babylon 5<\/em> made the same mistake, misstating the line of succession for Emperor of the Centauri Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a professional writer and editor, I have a lot of gripes about English usage. I may as well vent about them here. I thought of categorizing them under Gripes, but I decided to give them their own category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw a blog comment today that referred to the Speaker of the House of Representatives as &#8220;third in line&#8221; for the presidency. No, the Speaker is second in line. The Vice President is first. The President is not &#8220;in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/?p=671\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usage-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":674,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}