Re: Clarity of Orders

Michael D. Ashland wrote:
>You are going to get opinions both ways, but "to" is a preposition, not
>a verb, and as such, the presence of the word "support(s)" (a transitive
>verb in this case) in the orders would settle the question in my mind.

Case 6 is an infinitive, read literally, so I can see how your 
argument might hold there.  But I do not understand your willingness 
to parse the phrase "to supports" down into its components and then 
rule that "supports" is somehow more important because of which part 
of speech it represents.  By itself, "to" has a clear meaning. 
("[U]sed as a function word to indicate movement", if you want the 
exact, pedantic phrase from Merriam-Webster online.)  By itself, 
"supports" has an equally clear, but opposite, meaning.  Their 
concatenation, "to supports", is grammatically nonsensical.

I just don't see how the part of speech of the component words helps 
you divine the intent of the person writing the order.  I'm not 
trying to be overly picky, I'm just genuinely interested in hearing 
why you think the part of speech helps, given that each word is 
independently successful in conveying unambiguous meaning.

In my view, as likely as not we are looking at a cut-and-paste error. 
The player intended one thing at first, and then tried to cut in the 
opposite thing but failed to delete the superceded material.  But 
which material is to be superceded?  There's just no way to know.

-Adam