I thought this might make some of you guys chuckle.

http://encarta.msn.com/en...marpopmain

Grammar Lessons for Pop Stars

Here's my fantasy:

I'm a teacher with a class full of pop- and rock-star students. It's the end of the term, and I can finally give them the grades they deserve for butchering the mother tongue in the name of the Top 40.

It's only fair. After all, we're held hostage to the sweet, paralyzing drone of radio broadcasts and televised music videos. While the entertainers get rich, their bad rhymes, vapid lyrics, and outright inexcusable grammar assault our eardrums and get stuck in our heads like so many wads of gum under the study hall desk.


It's a wonder we haven't all been brainwashed into saying "baby" instead of "um" when we're pausing mid-sentence. And it's not just the pop musicians of today. This has been going on for generations--at least since Elvis claimed to be "all shook up." (It's shaken, Elvis, not shook. More on that later.)

And so it is high time we take back the language from the pierced, unusually long, and occasionally ululating tongues that have twisted it. The way to do this, of course, is to give them grades. After all, what could be more frightening to a celebrity than getting an "F" from an encyclopedia-site columnist?

Exactly. To find out which of your favorite entertainers is among my worst lingual offenders, baby, read on.

Detention, for rhyming and other crimes

Study hall would be far too crowded if I sentenced every pop musician who committed rhyme crimes and other language atrocities. So I’m going to pick on the varsity players--the people who've had big hits.

I’ll start with Paula Cole, whose "I Don’t Want To Wait" became the theme song for Dawson’s Creek, the intellectual poseur of high school shows. It takes Cole only 13 words to break the most basic of grammar rules just so she can make a weak rhyme:

"So open up your morning light

And say a little prayer for I."

For I? As Duran Duran so correctly put it, "Don’t save a prayer for me now." Me. Not I. When you have a preposition such as "for," you cannot say "I," even if it almost rhymes with light. The same goes for Bryan Adams's "Run to You," where he rasps,

"She says her love for me could never die

But that'd change if she ever found out about you and I."

Ugh!

Joining Paula Cole and Bryan Adams in study hall will be Usher, who has lately been at the top of Billboard’s Top 100 with "U Got it Bad." For now, we’ll ignore the "got" and focus on the letter U at the beginning of his song. I considered the possibility that Usher wrote "U" instead of "you" because he likes the U in his name. Then, swiftly and utterly, I rejected this because sometimes he writes "you." There is no apparent method to his madness.

And I quote:

"U got it, u got it bad

When you're on the phone

Hang up and you call right back

U got it, u got it bad."

I can only conclude that Usher is trying to be cool. But the fact is, no one is cool enough to get away with this. The only excusable use for one-letter word substitutes is when you’re sending alpha-numeric messages to a teeny screen, where every letter counts. In all other contexts, U, 2, and other one-letter word substitutes make for hideous reading. What’s more, pagers and cell phones are not allowed in my class. So, "4" crimes in the name of cool, Usher is busted.

Similarly, Cristina Aguilera gets an "F" for failing to give this girl what she wants: correct grammar.

In "What a Girl Wants," Aguilera explains how she wants,

"Somebody cool but real tender too;

Somebody, baby, just like you…"

It should be "really tender," because tender is an adjective, and it requires the adverb "really" as a modifier. Aguilera should write the following crib note on her oft-exposed midriff: Adjectives modify nouns; adverbs modify adjectives and verbs.

An "F" for flaccid writing

Ah, Peter Frampton: '70s icon and sensitive songwriter--sensitive to everyone but his high school English teacher, that is. Although Frampton's lyrics aren't the worst that have ever been written, some fall squarely into the hopelessly confusing category.

A good example is the song, “Can't Take That Away,” which goes like this:

"Like a fool I'd been waiting - until you came along

You made a blind man see

Your love made all the difference

And nobody... can't take that away from me"

Ignoring the worn-out cliché of the blind man cured by the balm of love, focus on the two last lines. "Your love made all the difference, and nobody can't take that away from me." In other words, everybody can take it away from me.

This is a double negative, and by using it, Peter Frampton said the opposite of what he really wanted to say--unless he was being ironic, and he was actually insulting the person whose love restored his sight.

But you don't need to be living in the '70s to confuse your fans. Just listen to Britney Spears and her boyfriend's band, N'Sync. If you're not distracted by the shiny clothes, gratuitous pythons, and gyrating dance moves, the words of their songs are revealed to be weaker than a wall of pudding.

In "Overprotected," Britney sings,

"Say hello to the girl that I am!

You're gonna have to see through my perspective

I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am

And I don't wanna be so damn protected"

Britney might need to make mistakes to learn who she is. But grammar mistakes don't lead to self-discovery, they just make people sound dumb. She should have sung, "Say hello to the girl who I am." "That" is for animals and inanimate objects, such as hair extensions.

Meanwhile, Britney should work harder to protect herself from lyrics that read like a diary entry penned by someone who's just returned home, sweaty and tired, from a seventh-grade dance. They're nigh unintelligible. First she wants a greeting; then she wants someone to see through her eyes, as though what she's doing makes sense, and then she demands permission to make mistakes, which would imply that whatever she's doing does not make sense. It's dizzying.

But the song that really lives up to its name is N'Sync's "It Makes Me Ill."

"It makes me ill

To see you give

Love and attention at his will

And you can't imagine how it makes me feel

To see you with him

(Repeat)"

Weak-sauce repetition aside, "ill" and "feel" are unimaginative rhymes, to say the least.

What's less impressive than that, however, is the awkward use of the word "will." Thy will be done works well in an ancient prayer. But no one talks this way anymore, and it's gratuitous to use a word just for the sake of rhyme. This smells like teen spirit in the worst sort of way, unlike the far more inventive Nirvana "Teen Spirit" lyrics, which rhyme "overboard" with "assured." Stuff like that is unexpected, it's vivid, and it works.

Hall pass granted

Lest we fall into the trap of insisting that all artists follow the rules, I'll admit that there are plenty of times when rule-breaking makes for great songwriting.

I'm tempted to give Elvis a hall pass, and not just because I don't want corpses in study hall. "All Shook Up," frankly, sounds better than "All Shaken Up." Although you could make a case for "All Mixed Up," because it keeps the same meter as the original song, there's something about the word "shook" that contributes to the feeling of chaos that Elvis is feeling. He's so mixed up he can't get the grammar right, which is perhaps the same thing that happened to those movie parents who "shrunk" their kids.

Granted, he goes a bit too far when he sings, "When they said you was high classed, well, that was just a lie." It's "high class," Elvis. You know, just like Graceland. And it's "you were," not "you was."

The ultimate hall pass, though, goes to the Rolling Stones for "Satisfaction."

"I can't get any satisfaction" would be correct, but it is utterly without soul. To be grammatical here would be to write Muzak instead of music. It would be completely unsatisfying, not unlike the Britney Spears cover of this same song.

The bottom line here is that if you know the rules, you can increase the power of your writing by breaking them. But if you don't have a grip on grammar, you're most likely going to sound stupid.

This concludes my grammar lesson for pop stars. And with that, baby, I'm going to listen to the only song that can follow such a fine lesson: Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher."
[This message was edited Tue Aug 19 13:13:52 PDT 2003 by VinaBlue]

Okay, I tried really hard not to post this, but I couldn't help it...

It's GRAMMAR...not GRAMMER!!!




(deep breath)




I feel better now.

Anxiety said:

lmao

Anxiety said:

LOL! OH MY GOD!

Typing too fast I guess.

Damn, that's FUNNY.


[This message was edited Tue Aug 19 13:16:34 PDT 2003 by VinaBlue]