To all: Fuck the System! Write, Write, Write! Write the bitches, your weak teachers, the Barcas and Bushes of the world away. Don’t let anyone tame your tongue or let their eloquent lashings stop you! So what if you end up writing like Adam Virs surfs, if you can punt and pull in, does it really matter to you and your bros if you flap like a spastic monkey?

And damn, Parko! - if you ever read this crap, you got wicked style! You do not flap like a monkey.

Seriously.

Look it up on Ebay if you don’t believe me.

You cited dictionary.com. Specifically, a usage note appearing therein under the “refer” entry. You quoted the note as support for your position. The note, and by extension your having quoted it, actually undermines your position.

The note, as fate had it, contained an example purporting to illustrate that “refer back” is not an irrational construction because it is possible to “refer ahead.”

Leaving aside the fact that the usage note author erroneously posits “refer ahead” instead of “refer forward” as the reflexive of “refer back” (ahead : behind as forward : backward), the author presents the following sentence as proof that “to refer back” is not irrational provided to “refer forward” is a distinguishable concept.

Jones promised that if he was elected to the council, Harris would be made the council president.

The author’s rationale . . . that the pronoun “he,” as it appears in the sentence, can reasonably take either Jones or Harris as its antecedent. It is self-evident that his proposition is stupid if for no other reason than because rules of grammar already make clear that a pronoun’s antecedent is the last noun that agrees in person, number, and gender. Applying the rule here yields the following conclusion:

If Jones was promising that if Harris got elected then Harris would be elected president, then, Jones has a 4th grade education at best.

But the fact that his entire concept is completely irrelevant to the pertinent inquiry is only the first of the dictionary editor’s errors.

Let me break this down. The original sentence consists of a subordinate clause followed by an independent clause. If a retard wrote it or a retard interpreted it, two possible constructions are inevitably suggested:

1: If Jones gets elected, then Harris would be president.
2: If Harris gets elected, then Harris would be president.

Unsurprisingly, both conditions applied here, a retard wrote it and then interpreted it – only in this case, both conditions were vested in the same person, the web-editor.

What is clear is that the main idea being expressed consists of a hypothetical situation followed by a consequence. In grammar, this is called a conditional sentence. A conditional sentence must contain a conditional [“if”] clause and a result [“then”] clause.

Jones promised that if he was elected to the council, Harris would be made the council president.

What the hell . . . no “then” in this conditional. To correct the sentence, it should look like this:

Jones promised that if he was elected to the council, then Harris would be made the council president.

The above fix results in a formal conditional sentence. It also happens that the conditional clause presents an improbable present condition, followed by an appropriate results clause that accounts for a changed condition. Such constructions are known as present unreal conditionals. Present unreal conditional sentences distinguish what would be true if its antecedent were true (as opposed to what is true if its condition is true). Naturally, then, the result clause in a present unreal conditional must contain one of the following auxiliaries: could, would, should, might. Here, the author actually gets this part right.

But never fear. There are other considerations here that the retarded web-editor botches. In the case of present unreal conditionals where the dependent clause introduces the possibility of a changed condition, the writer must use the subjunctive, a verb mood, to signal possibility. In these situations, the construction should be referred to as a subjunctive conditional. Applying the subjunctive mood to the sentence at issue here results in the following alteration:

Jones promised that if he were elected to the council, then Harris would be made the council president.

Conclusion:

The mere fact that the usage note author’s sentence features a pronoun with an intentionally ambiguous antecedent as proof that to “refer back” is not an irrational expression, proves only that he is a fucking retard. The sentence he so carefully crafted contains two unintentional grammatical errors: a failure to apply the proper verb mood and an incomplete conditional expression.

Your evidence, Stu, isn’t persuasive.

So the question is this: Other than the fact that the expression “refer back” is widely used by retards like the incompetent, web-editor, what makes you think that “refer back” is a proper usage given established conventions – of both reason and the English language?