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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 18-Feb-2008 10:43 PM

Owed to a Spell Checker
with apologies to Percy Dovetonsils

I have a spelling checquer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea

Eye ran this poem threw it
Your sure real glad two no
It's vary polished in it's weigh
My checker tolled me sew

A checker is a bless sing
It freeze yew lodes of thyme
It helps me awl stiles two reed
And aides me when aye rime

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud
And wee mussed dew the best wee can
Sew flaws are knot aloud

And now bee cause my spelling
is checked with such grate flare
Their are know faults with in my site
Of nun eye am a wear

Each frays comes posed up on my screen
Eye trussed to be a joule
The checker poured o'er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule

That's why aye brake in two averse
By righting wants too pleas
Sow now ewe sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear for pea seas

Fourth: Yet the "grocer's apostrophe" runs rampant. I think we're seeing a return to the days of two forms of s. As the long s has been replaced with the standard s (which was then used only terminally), now the standard s in terminal position is being replaced with 's.

Last Edited on 20-Feb-2008 7:43 PM

By the way, have you heard or read "Let's we go to the mall"?

"They're just doing what they see." One doesn't see 's on simple plural nouns that often, except in student writing, instant messaging, and the like. Therefore, this practice is not a return to some old variant of the English language that is being consciously adopted. It occurs because its practitioners are ignorant and are imitating one another. It proliferates not because educated people are adopting it but because kids read little else besides scribblings of their peers. In that sense, they are doing what they see. It is another example of how, unfettered by education, semiliteracy and illiteracy march on.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Those intrusive apostrophes occur on professionally painted signs too, on construction sites announcing the coming business and on the doors of small merchants. On hand-painted notices, the grocer's apostrophe has a long history:
a weblog
a Londoner's comment

It's not just each other they're copying.

Kids aren't the only people who say, "Mary and me went to the movies." They aren't the only people who intersperse their speech with "like" and "y'know" until it becomes sickening. Hey, President Bush said, in a speech in Tennessee (on February 21, 2001): "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." This is the man who said he was going to be the "education president."

We should not be attempting to justify faulty grammar, sloppiness, and the abuse of the language on the grounds that they represent some kind of legitimate evolution of English. (Yes, language is dynamic and does change, but what's happening now is linguistic abuse, not evolution.) We should be pounding on the school doors, demanding that kids be taught the conventions of English grammar – and we should set the example by observing these conventions, not by pardoning semiliterate abuses because "everybody does it."
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Let's you and me go to the mall.
Let's all of us go to the mall.

It seems as though "let's" is becoming a new part of speech in which the "s" means nothing: the word might as well be written "letz". Or perhaps it's the same kind of duplication as this, which is distressingly common:

The problem is is that they just won't listen.