A Gnashing of Speech
Next to a child learning to play the violin or tabor,
The thing I hate most is English spoken by my average neighbor.
I cannot enough deplore the hideous clamor
Of English as she is spoke by the enemies of grammar.
If there’s one sort that throws me into fits,
It’s the people who cannot spell “its.”
They don’t know apostrophes right from wrong,
So they scatter them copiously where they don’t belong,
And hoard when they ought to bestow them,
As if fearing they soon might outgrow them.
Another person for whom I have no room
Is the one who says “who” but means “whom.”
The only one worse
Is the untutored heathen who utters the reverse.
These manglers can’t get their pronouns to agree,
Which I admit is harder than it used to be.
Now that we finally discern the whole race isn’t male,
“Will everyone pick up his pen” sends the offender to political jail.
Still, you’d think at least they’d remember their cases
As easily as they know their family’s faces.
Yet people say, “between she and I”
Who’d never say, “Him and me will give it a try.”
Even the educated are only semi-literate on a higher stratum,
Saying “data is” as if they’d forgotten one fact is a datum.
People who allow Latin endings to confuse them
Shouldn’t be permitted to say words that use them.
This would immediately extinguish the proud little fizz
Of those who blithely say, “A phenomena is.”
And if lawbreakers really flaunted the law I’d personally be thrilled,
Though the way some people talk you’d think they’re about to be killed.
I’d volunteer to be on the language police,
But, alas, there is no slammer
Big enough to cage up all the people who abuse grammar.
Even though it’s a crime,
Nobody does “their” time.