You Cannot Be Serious, # 29

The first, and worse, of two mangles from BBC 1’s Watchdog a couple of weeks ago. This is a detail of a tee-shirt specially made for a ‘rogue trader’ exposed on the programme:

Source: BBC 1 Watchdog, series 34, episode 2 (23 October 2014), and online: ‘UK Damp and Decay Control - part 4’

This mangling of the Gospel of John, 8:7, is hideous, but certainly isn’t unique. For instance, ‘Let he who is without sin’ is the title of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, series 5, episode 7. However, the Star Trek franchise has never set itself up as an authority on English grammar, unlike the BBC, which offers English courses for children and adults, but doesn’t seem to require its staff to lead by example  or, where necessary, take a remedial course.

The phrase suffers from hypercorrection, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘[t]he use of an erroneous word form or pronunciation based on a false analogy with a correct or prestigious form, such as the use of I instead of me as a grammatical object (as in he invited my husband and I to lunch)’.
Let he who is without sin