Road Apples by Tim Sanders
June 17, 2013

Plu Imperfect Alabamer Grammar



All too often today's news headlines are confusing because they contain words. Since the advent of the Internet, with its e-mail, texting, and Facebook capabilities, actual words have been replaced by acronyms like LOL, LMAO, BYOB and Old MacDonald Had a Farm, EIEIO. A recent poll, which I personally conducted my own self, showed that 92 percent of college graduates now spell cat with a “k” because that letter is easier to access on their computer keyboards. That is called progress, and the result of all this progress is that grammatical rules mean nothing nowadays. This, in turn, means that grammar columns are becoming harder and harder to write, since 92 percent of college graduates who e-mail us here at Alabamer Grammar Central, Inc., spell “cat” with a “k,” and when it is plural they spell it with an apostrophe, as in “Lookit them scalded kat's run, Jerome!

I say all of this to explain why sometimes these grammar columns stray from the strictly grammatical questions to the kinds of questions that 92 percent of today's college graduates can compose. Here are some, a few of which we pass along to you exactly as composed, and some of which we've had to decompose and recompose for clarity's sake.


Q: My girlfriend is named Olive Hacklespur, and she has been hinting around a lot over the past seven or eight years about how she ort to change her name to mine. My name is Lester Darden, and I tole her that if she done that it would make her Olive Darden, which sounds way too much like an Italian restaurant. Last night she said she didn't care if my last name was Branch, Tree, or Oil, she'd heard them all and Olive Darden couldn't be no worser. She wanted my name, and said if we didn't go to a justus of the piece and make it legal by next week she was going to start spending her weekends with Nelson Drabb, and I could just go pee up a rope. Nelson Drabb eats boiled okra with his fingers. What do you suggest?

A: We here at Grammar Central would advise against peeing up a rope, and suggest that Nelson use a fork. We'd further suggest that you tell Olive that your name may be an odd name for a woman, but if she's got no problem with Olive Oil, Olive Tree, or Olive Drabb, you'd be happy to drive her to the courthouse to make her a bona fide, legal Lester Darden. And, if sometime in the next decade you should suddenly decide to “tie the knot,” as they say, she could regain a bit of her own, personal identity by hyphenating herself into Olive-Hacklespur-Lester-Darden-Darden.


Q: I have a headache.

A: Me too.


Q: Irene she says she seen this advertisement on TV with Joe Theisman who was a quarterback for the Redskins until he was injured on TV with a compound fracture to one of his prostrates. Joe said he was having an awful time broadcasting because he had to turn off his microphone and run all the way to the bathroom on the other side of the stadium every five minutes. She said that was why they always showed so many instant replays and commercials. Anyway, Joe was advertising Super Beta Prostrate pills, which if I was to get as much good as was in one of them pills I would have to climb seventy salt pall mental trees and eat fifty thousand of them berries, which would be enough to choke a horse. She wants me to try them things, but I don't even know what a salt pall mental tree looks like. Besides which, if they would choke a horse, ain't no telling what they'd do to me. I got a small throat, which I inherited from my Momma's people, specially Uncle Squeak and Chipmunk Charlie. Can you help me?

A: No.


Q: This morning I read an Internet article about a toy gun buyback held June 8 at the Strobridge Elementary School in Hayward, California. The article said that children were given books and other prizes for turning in their toy guns. This afternoon I read a June 12, New York Post article which said that Sesame Street is sponsoring a program to distribute “tool kits” to schools in ten different states. The kit includes a booklet entitles “Little Children, BIG Challenges: Incarceration.” It tells kids what to do when Mommy goes to prison. I started to read another article about a high school faculty somewhere whose members had all agreed to have their heads removed at some point and cryogenically frozen so as to have something to attach to a healthy body later on when science finally mastered the art of head transplants. I didn't finish that article, because I started to twitch and ate an entire napkin I'd left next to my computer. So here are my questions:

What kind of a prize does a kid get when he turns in his squirt gun? Is it that “What to do When Mommy's in Prison” book? If those high school faculty members have their heads removed and frozen, will any of their students notice? Will I ever be able to read anything on the Internet again without being heavily medicated? Since you are a grammarian, can you present your answer in the pluperfect subjunctive mood? Huh?

A: That is a compound question, and to be grammatically correct we can only give you a compound answer, which is:

(a) Squirt guns are worth two Sesame Street “Mommy in Prison” booklets, but an actual pot metal Gene Autry cap pistol will get your child a copy of the inspirational “Freddie Has Two Daddies” textbook.

(b) Not until the Great Summer Vacation Thaw.

(c) Probably not, and

(d) Probably not.


As you can see, you don't necessarily need to offer a grammatical question to get a grammatical answer here at Alabamer Grammar. And we'll try our darndest to answer at least one future question in the pluperfect subjunctive mood, but you need to know that our mood does tend to swing dramatically, depending on the barometric pressure.