It seems to me that this arrangement emphasizes the Who instead of the Whether (which obviously depends on, but is different than, the What). The alternative contraction (I won’t) would seem to make the sentence sound more like a general disclaimer than a statement suggesting a difference between its speaker and someone else.

However, you appear to suggest, alluding to what I said in the original post, that someone might just miss the word “not.” But in this case, I think the sentence is unlikely to be misread, because the distinctness of the leading contraction bleeds over onto the specifier that follows it.

As an aside, I don’t think the contractions I don’t and I’d not are at all interchangeable, as the first means “I do not” (indicative) while the second means “I would not” (subjunctive).

The example that immediately comes to mind is “I will not.” I have always spoken/written this as “I won’t” but I have noticed that some people write “I’ll not.” I suppose this example also works for “I do not” (I don’t v. I’d not).

How do your rules of emphasis and persuasion come into play in this situation? Surely these “alternate” contractions create tremendous potential for a misreading . . .

1. While the schools themselves may be non-profit, they pay their deans and faculty hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries. This they cannot do without maintaining cash flow in the form of tuition. Thus, it is rather irrelevant what they “believe” their “mission” to be.

2. Your characterization of the rankings is clearly a joke, otherwise I would berate it. And even if the rankings are based on nothing more than someone’s opinion, that opinion is perhaps the strongest corollary available for institutional prestige and the accompanying likelihood that a degree from a given school will enable its graduates to compete for world-class jobs. Chief Justice Roberts, after all, did not graduate from Elon. Next, the reason lower-ranked schools should be first to decrease production is that they do a greater disservice to their students by maintaining operations than do top-ranked schools: until a degree from a low-ranked school is worth the abhorrent price one pays for it (in terms of average starting salary), it is cruel for those schools to keep cranking out lawyers who will be relegated to the lowest rungs in the profession, statistically or economically speaking. If the upper-echelon schools are also overpriced, they should scale back as well; but I don’t think a law degree from Duke (for example) has become “not worth it” yet.

3. The “who goes first” problem is what caused me to write the post in the first place. There is no reason—other than recognizing an ethical duty—to be “first” to decrease one’s institution’s revenues, whether by shutting doors completely or by scaling back enrollment. Your proposal of having schools scale back operations simultaneously is a good attempt to keep some market competition involved, but I doubt an idea that is as “irrational” as you seem to believe mine to be will receive equal buy-in from enough institutions to make it count. Besides, I have already conceded the apparent preposterousness of my suggestion, so marrying it to a practical compromise seems like mixing oil and water.

4. If the downturn is indeed temporary, my suggestion is actually the guarantor of unheralded riches and opportunity for those who remain in the profession; for if the economy booms, a healthy shortage of lawyers will justify higher legal fees and (ultimately) more lawyers. But continuing to train lawyers before such a recovery is putting the cart dangerously before the horse.

1. Most law schools are non-profit. Therefore, profit cannot be the motivation for them to continue in the face of an economic downturn. Maybe they actually have the audacity to believe that their mission to train lawyers is not linked to your future salary.

2. Assuming it’s rational for law schools to shut down (it’s not), why should it be the “lower-ranked” schools that shut down? First of all, has no one clued you in to the fact that rankings are arbitrary and uninformed guesses based on nothing more than some jackass’ opinion? Secondly, according to your “economic” argument, shouldn’t it be the schools in locales with the highest number of lawyers per capita that should shut down?

3. Who would go first? What idiot administrator would volunteer to fire his faculty and quit his job before any other school had done so? Have you considered that a slightly more practical idea might be for all law schools to agree to draw down acceptance rates across the board?

4. Finally (and I think most obviously), are you aware that your suggestion is terribly misguided if in fact the economic downturn is a temporary one? Isn’t it possible that the reason law schools are not shutting down is that they–rightly–expect the economy to recover??

First, in your sentence, the word “unnecessarily” is not only unnecessary, but also a poor choice of words. Think about what you are attempting to communicate with that sentence. You are saying “[there is] no reason to . . . suppress a writer’s creativity by prohibiting split infinitives.” Adding the word “unnecessary” here is not necessary at all, for doing so merely creates a tautology: of course you would think the prohibition on split infinitives is “unnecessary” if you believe there is “no reason” to forbid them.

Second, if the word were indeed “necessary to the sentence’s meaning,” it could easily be moved to follow the word “creativity.” And if you think fixing a grammatical error in this fashion makes you sound like a clown, I should probably clarify for you that the “clown standard” is an objective one, not subjective. A true clown, after all, will fail to understand the problem with split infinitives in the first place, so he will be doubly perplexed if he attempts to revise his sentences in such a manner as to avoid revealing his prosaic handicap.

How can Americans receive this weekly source of entertainment with the renewed faith and optimism you describe, when they are facing the worst economy of their lives? Big business is clearly searching for something, anything, to to win back their hearts, and what better way than through some contrived reality television show?

I admit that I love the show. I find myself inspired by each employee’s sob story, rooting for the CEO every week as he demonstrates the fact that he does have a heart and makes some grand humanitarian gesture to remedy the plight of said lowly employee. But the more I see of the show, the more I question this scheme. It is obvious that each employee featured on the show was selected to be shadowed for a very specific reason—to be exploited. The employee becomes not a source of inspiration, but rather a pawn in big business’s attempt to sway the public back into its corner. These corporations are doing what they do best, taking advantage of their employees. This time they are just doing it in a more deceptive form. It seems to me that those who are able to recognize this would be repulsed by these new lows rather than encouraged by the “blessings [big business] can bestow.”

This reaction to the show is summed nicely by an anonymous comment left on the CBS website: “What a pathetic, sleazy (and poorly executed) attempt to program the general public that big daddy corporation is looking out from them.”

Maybe some Americans are falling back in love with big businesses as you say they are, but maybe the show is having the opposite effect.