Grammar Hammer

I'm just the same guy that she dissed
and now she never passes me with out blowing a kiss
yo girl your dismissed

Shaggy, the reggae singer, yaps away these lines before he goes off beat with the guitar in his hit single Why you treat me so bad. First he is palled that she spited him and then when the gal gears up to the guy, he puts her off. Galling him/her can make he/she pale with pride.

Hell! How to get rid of those slashes that ugly the sentence. Use a collective pronoun (or whatever those grammar goons call it as) – their or they or them. Shucks! I don’t wanna do it –drown my pronoun (he/she) in an ocean of theys and thems.

Ah! Here’s the rescue team of linguists (what!). They (I’ve no other option than that third-person pronoun and I don wanna mention that tribe again) are prissy about words and pull up grammar outlaws like me and Shaggy.

Shaggy freaks out Yo – to mean you or your. But the good news is that it can now be used instead of that creepy he/she. Of late, kids have been using it a lot; adults must be ashamed of missing it out. Little tots porn off new words by playing out on the existing ones. This in spite of being scolded for saying cutted or putted. Sadly, these are errors that egg at them. But as these superkids grow, they outgrow those errors and they start egging at other’s errors. Quite an evolution ah!

Anyhow, Yo is a welcome change for those who want to stay out of the gender debate. “Gender-neutral” is the word. Don’t show off your gender or else you got to atone before those grammar goddesses. Yo put the grammar books aside and think sanely.

*****

Staying with gender, I hooked onto the net to give some online comfort to a gal-pal. Yo was stung by the parent bug. My shoddy English couldn’t help her either. So picked on a pleasant tune by Cyndi Lauper, who’s a great hit with sensitive feminists:

I come home in the morning light
My mother says: "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh, mother dear, we're not the fortunate ones
And girls they wanna have fun
Oh, girls just wanna have fun

The phone rings in the middle of the night
My father yells: "What you gonna do with your life?"
Oh, daddy dear, you know you're still number one
But girls they wanna have fun
Oh girls just wanna have

That's all they really want
Some fun
When the working day is done
Oh, girls, they wanna have fun
Oh, girls just wanna have fun

And this fun is in fact a fuuuuuuuuuuuun. That’s not a pun, but something Lauper elsewhere said “real fun” that gals shouldn’t lose for their gang. Stick with your own dose of fun, you see.