Roberts the Mutilator

Language guru Steve Pinker entertains himself and us at Justice Roberts' expense with his comments on the swearing-in snafu, and how the Constitution just isn't good enough for our chief justice (link).  But what got  me was this bit:

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

No joke? Doesn't this guy know the first thing about conscientious collection of data? Do we infer that he would do the same thing wifh confessions? With the B of A balance sheet (now, that's a thought, actually).  With, um, you know, the First Amendment?

I am tempted to, but will not, write this off as some sort of conservative thing. Quite the contrary: Circuit Judge Danny Boggs down in Louisville used to give clerkship applicants a "general knowledge" quiz--I suspect to demonstrate how learned Danny Boggs was, but let that pass (maybe he still gives the quiz, I just haven't seen one lately). Anyway, Boggs (who, I think it is fair to say, is as right-wing as Roberts) liked to include a "copy edidting" question in his quiz. And as part of the copy editing exercise, he'd spring a quotation from somebody else, the quotation including a crude grammatical error. I assume that if you "corrected" the quoted error, you were out. So Roberts may be able to rewrite the Constitution, but it sounds like he wouldn't be able to clerk for Danny Boggs.