Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Oct. 17, 2011
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More Alabamer Grammar 4 U In today’s society, many Americans use Internet-speak when tweeting or twittering or chirping things like “I M going 2 C U 2morrow & wee kn tri on sum hatz, LOL, :).” But grammar, spelling and punctuation are still important. If, for example, you were to sign some official document “R (only) B (only) Johnson, those all-important parentheses would indicate that your first and middle names were only R and B, and that those letters were not initials. Without the parentheses, however, you might find yourself stuck with a really stupid name for the rest of your life. Legend has it that just such a fate befell Ronly Bonly Mahoney, who forgot to punctuate properly when he filled out his Army enlistment papers in 1942. Q: Speaking of letters, my teacher said Ernest Hemingway was a man of letters. Which ones was they? A: Hemingway’s favorite letters were consonants. He wrote a novel called “The Old Man and the C,” which chronicled his years as an impoverished writer with a missing typewriter key. Q: Dang! A: Dang, indeed! Q: My friend Zebo on Facebook who I never met but was recommended to me by my sister Neeny who said she thinks he is the same Zebo she met once at the mall in Gadsden and he was selling paper hats and kazoos at a booth and except for that seemed very smart, he always writes “just sayin’” after things he just said, like “HOLY CRAP! They is charging me $5 to use my ATM card, and all I got to say is them people is liars and whoremongers and pissants and other peoples bottom wipers and eat up with parasites and ort to be tooken out and have there heads stuck up a hot pumpkin shell to draw out the worms and then burn in Hell, each and every one ... just sayin’.” Then there is a place for people to leave a comment. So here is my comment. What does “just sayin’” mean, anyhow? A: It means that your Facebook friend Zebo said something, and he wants everybody to know he didn’t want to personally stick anybody’s head up a hot pumpkin shell, he just SAID it. He just said it, and nobody else just said it, and he won’t say “just sayin’” again until the next time he just says something equally profound. You know, so everybody will know he just ... well, you get the idea. This penchant for saying “just sayin’” probably explains why Zebo was selling paper hats in a booth at the mall. Q: Last week I read that the town of Cicero, Illinois, paid $1,000 for 250 rubber chickens to be passed out at their annual Houby Day Parade by somebody named Svengoolie. Does that sound right to you? A: That is either a mathematical or a political question, and this is a grammar column. Please ask a grammar question. Q: All right then, define “Houby” and “Svengoolie.” A: A Houby is a Czechoslovakian mushroom, and every year Cicero celebrates Czechoslovakian mushrooms with a festival and a parade. Don’t ask why. Svengoolie is the humorous host of a horror movie show on Chicago TV. His trademark is a rubber chicken, which should tell you just how humorous he is. I know you didn’t ask, but you need to know that Rosemary Walsh Konz, a member of the Cicero Housing and Real Estate Board and daughter of Cicero Town Trustee Lorraine Walsh, owns the company that sold Cicero the rubber chickens. According to an October 7 Chicago Sun Times article, her “You and Me” company also sold the city nearly $600,000 worth of Houby Day promotional items, “including more than 200,000 pens, pencils, and highlighters, 5,000 mouse pads and 4,000 ice cream scoops,” many with Town President Larry Dominik’s name printed on them. The Konz company “has donated “more than $6,000 in cash and merchandise to Dominik or his political allies.” That should tell you all you need to know about Houbies and Svengoolies. Unless I miss my guess, soon we’ll all be looking at corrupt politicians at all levels and saying, “them’s a pack of Houbies and Svengoolies if ever I seen any!” Q: So I done the math, and is $4 per rubber chicken a fair price? A: You can get a deluxe rubber chicken with extra large rubber drumsticks at more than one rubber chicken farm right here in Cherokee County for only $2.99. Of course you will have to pluck the rubber feathers and dress the chicken yourself. (Nothing looks better than a rubber chicken dressed in a little latex coat and tails.) Q: Yesterday I was down on my hands and knees looking under Miss Gackler’s desk when she come into the classroom and asked me what was I doing down there and I said I had just got down there for only a minute to as quick as I could find my felt tip pen and she said for me to get up and quit splitting my Endfinitives so I was embarrassed and put my English book over my rear end and backed out of the room and run to the bathroom and took off my Endfinitives which Momma had told me was actually Tony Hellfingers and inspected every stitch very careful but there wasn’t no split nowhere and when I went back everybody had went to lunch except for Lester Hodspeckler who don’t eat but one meal a day because of being an oh beast child and anyhow me and him we got to talking and ... and– A: You’ve forgotten your question, haven’t you? Q: I got to go. I got an awful headache which come on all at once. A: That’s okay. We all get them from time to time. [NOTE: Please do not submit any more questions about either the “synopsis” or the “dangling participle.” Those are medical questions, and just thinking about having surgery on either organ makes us very uncomfortable here at Grammar Central.] |