Copy-editing the primaries: In the wake of John Edwards’s departure from the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both released sucking-up statements aimed at securing an endorsement from the cheery populist.

Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, and the Politico all include this sentence in Obama’s statement: “John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this — that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose.”

Of course, Obama meant to say that two Americas can become one — an attempt to connect Edwards’s “two Americas” theme with Obama’s own message of unity. (Indeed, that’s how Obama’s website has it.) But someone — a sleep-deprived Obama staffer, perhaps? — added an extra n, and now it looks as though Obama was paying some kind of weird tribute to the Edwardses’ marriage.

Your linguistic update for the day: I have always opposed the colloquial use of deconstruct as a fancy synonym for thoroughly analyze. It makes me think of the Village Voice‘s arts section, and not in a good way. Deconstruction properly refers to a specific and rather abstruse school of critical reading in which texts are examined not for their meanings or methods but for their internal contradictions and lacunae. As a rule of thumb, if a person hasn’t gone to graduate school in the humanities, he or she probably isn’t deconstructing anything.

But when a usage is employed by Joan Didion, that usage has, by definition, become acceptable and probably admirable. So as of now we can all go to town, deconstructionwise.

Indianapolis, why don’t you sing? I am reading This Is Your Brain on Music, which is fascinating but also tantalizingly inconclusive. I suspect that reflects the current state of neuroscience — we know just enough about the brain’s mechanics to have our interest triggered, but not enough to satisfy our curiosity. I’m still waiting to learn why perhaps the most thrilling of all neuromusical experiences is hearing a song you love successfully transposed into a different genre. E.g. this, via Emily Gould.

Maybe you were thinking that a fitting way to end your week would be to watch Lou Reed and Pavarotti, backed by a full orchestra, singing “Perfect Day”. If so, you’re in luck.

Copy-editing the election: First, the unwelcome return of a familiar error. Joe Klein, writing in Time:

With the terrorist threat diminished, is it worth spending $9 billion a month to referee the eternal Mesopotamian ethnic differences?

Klein is talking about the struggle between the Sunni and the Shi’a, and about the Kurds’ fight for control of Kirkuk. Only one of these is an ethnic difference. (The incursions of Persian terrorists from Iran have an ethnic dimension, but Klein has already dismissed these as a contributor to the turmoil in Iraq.)

Second, from the NYT editorial page:

Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.

There is nothing technically wrong with this. The word denigrate simply means to criticize unfairly. But am I alone in thinking that its usage in this context leaves a bad taste? Washington mayoral aide David Howard got in trouble for using the word niggardly, which unlike denigrate is etymologically innocent of any connection to blackness.

The estimable Ty Alper explains the lethal-injection controversy, now under consideration by the Supreme Court:

If executions do resume, and the courts do not force states to reconsider the three-drug protocol that they all employ, inmates will continue to be paralyzed before they are killed. (The first drug in the protocol is supposed to anesthetize, the second one paralyzes, and the third one kills.) Many people do not know about this aspect of lethal injection. They hear witnesses describe lethal injection as “peaceful,” but don’t realize that such executions have literally been staged to look that way.

According to John Marcotte, “‘One More Day’ isn’t the stupidest Spider-Man plot Marvel has unleashed on the public. In fact, it’s not even in the top five.”

The Spider-Mobile: Try to wrap your mind around the sheer number of ways that a car driving on the side of buildings violates the laws of physics — even the relaxed type of physics one encounters in comic-books. How would it get from the ground to the wall in the first place? How can it move from one building to the next? What happens if a two-ton car is being supported by a one-inch plate-glass window? I don’t know the answers to these questions and I suspect that Gerry Conway and Ross Andru don’t either.

Oh and in case you forgot, Spider-Man has the coolest mode of transportation ever invented: web-swinging. Putting Spider-Man inside a car is like putting Aquaman inside a plane.

We’re at one of those moments in the Democratic primary campaign when bloggers can explain what’s going on better than mainstream reporters or pundits. Here, then, is an anonymous poster at Talking Points Memo, and here‘s Daniel Radosh. Update: And here‘s Zack’s hero Matthew Yglesias.

Timothy Noah on the Hillary “experience” meme:

Clinton’s claim to superior experience isn’t merely dishonest. It’s also potentially dangerous should she become the nominee. If Clinton continues to build her campaign on the dubious foundation of government experience, it shouldn’t be very difficult for her GOP opponent to pull that edifice down.

Check out this segment from Hardball (via TPM), and savor the sound of the Reagan coalition coming unglued.