To-day I found myself amused by a sentence that I don’t think was meant to be amusing.

Some background: Katie Porter is a U.S. representative from Orange County who launched a campaign for U.S. Senate last month. She’ll be vying for the Senate seat currently held by Dianne Feinstein, who, at 89, is widely expected to retire at the end of her term in 2024. I get a lot of emails from Katie Porter in the Promotions tab in my inbox.

To-day, Senator Feinstein made the unofficial official, announcing that she would not seek reëlection in 2024. Katie Porter’s email for the occasion praised Senator Feinstein for her decades of service and for her trailblazing role for women in Congress. It also included a sentence which I will highlight in boldface.

In 2018 when I first ran for office, 255 (!) women ran in important races up and down the ballot, all across the country. My freshman class in Congress included 36 women. While many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump, women leaders like Senator Feinstein helped blaze a path for us to follow.

This boldface sentence was inexplicably amusing. Why? I read my lines from top to bottom in chunks, and in this particular reading exercise, the chunk was cut off at the comma, so for a moment my mind held the following sentence fragment in focus:

While many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump, …

Uh-oh, said my mind. How do you finish a sentence that starts like that? Auto-complete suggested things like

While many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump, several of us ran for other reasons that had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

or even

While many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump, many more of us were inspired to run in support of Donald Trump.

Eek. None of these auto-completions were consistent with what I understand of Katie Porter’s political brand. Suddenly, in this split second, the writing stakes were higher! Was Katie Porter (or the intern who writes her emails) skilled enough as a rhetorician to finish off this sentence in a non-questionable manner? Imagine my simultaneous relief and confusion when the sentence resolved as follows:

While many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump, women leaders like Senator Feinstein helped blaze a path for us to follow.

Nice going, Katie Porter! You subverted the horrifying direction that the sentence was taking, rowed us back onto solid ground, and brought us back to the topic of Senator Feinstein, which was appropriate.

Except—wait a minute. Why was there even doubt in the first place? I think the problem was that I interpreted the while as the kind of conjunction that sets up a contrast. Like “While The Lamb Broker is not without flaws, its highly nuanced treatment of prejudice and sex and cruelty elevates it to one of the greatest films of the last decade.” The part after the comma is the thrust of the sentence, and it dispels the doubt that was raised in the part before the comma.

I’m not sure what the contrast between Many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump and Women leaders like Senator Feinstein helped blaze a path for us to follow is. These sentence fragments seem like they’re on the same side! Perhaps she was going for something more like While opposing Donald Trump was the reason we ran for office, our runs would not have been possible without Senator Feinstein doing it first.

But maybe she just started with the two sentence fragments Many of us were inspired to run in opposition to Donald Trump and Women leaders like Senator Feinstein helped blaze a path for us to follow, and she needed some sort of function word to connect them into a longer, more flowy sentence, and time was short, and she thought, while will do.

Writing is hard. Maybe this is why I find the sentence amusing.