Whatcha+oughta+know

You know the grammar in this country has really ** gone ** **downhill**. Either the general population’s just stopped caring, or there’s something wrong with the ** genetic pool **.

Either. Shouldn’t that be ‘eye-ther’? How does it go? “Two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”... yeah, so ‘eee-ther’. But the dictionary says ‘eye-ther’ way works.... so, ‘eye-ther’. ‘Eee-ther’. Then there’s “’i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’, except as in ‘eigh’ as in neighbour or weigh”, so ‘protein’ in an exception to the exception to the exception. ‘Cause if not, it should be pronounced ‘pro-tain’, and it’s not the only one, ‘eee-ther’. ‘Eye-ther’. There’s more. Coffee has a lot of ‘caff-ain’, he’s from a ‘for-ain’ country, and I’m a human ‘baing’. But at least his helps solve our eee-ther/eye-ther problem. It should be ‘ay-ther’. Or it should be spelled ‘i-e-t-h-e-r’. This brings us to what you oughta know about things we say wrong. I know your formative education was free, and text messaging’s destroyed any sense of correct spelling you may have ** gleened **, but ‘ecscape’? Doesn’t really matter – ‘ecscape’, ‘escape’. I could care less.

I think what you meant to say was, “I **couldn’t** care less’.

Oops, my bad.

‘Your bad’? What are you talking about? There’s no subject! Your bad toe? Your I.Q.? What?

Hey, don’t make me feel bad about the way I talk!

You feel bad, like evil? I think you mean ‘feel badly’.

Naw, I just talk different from you.

‘Differently”.

If you’re gonna hurry really quick to fix the way you talk, you’d better hurry really ‘quickly’ instead because just talking fast can lead to trouble. Think about this. I say, “I’m-un-nah go tuh littleitaly fer some stuff”.

I’m-un-nah?

Tuh?

Fer?

It sounds okay in the sentence, but if I pronounce ‘two’ and ‘four’ the same way when I count, you’d think I ain’t had none edjamacation.

One – tuh-three-fer...

I have to admit monster contractions and slurs like “I’m-un-nuh” and “littleitaly” may be wrong, but they’re really fun to say.

Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Can’t say them too close together. Littleitaly. Littleitaly. Littleitaly.You say it, you try. Littleitaly.

But why mash words together when you can hack ‘em apart ? We say things like “I wanna whole ‘nother apple.” “’Nother” is not a word. You just took the word ‘another’, cut it in half and stuck a word in the middle. That idea works great of ‘a lot’, but you see ‘a lot’ is two separate words already. Like already isn’t two words. What else do we say wrong? Accrost (across), Apprishiashun (Apprehension), Diassagreeance (disagreeance), restoral, supposebly (supposidely), tooken (token)... and about a billion more.

Sometimes saying words correctly is just too difficult. So we add the alternate pronunciation to the dictionary. Hey, it worked for species, coupon, associate.

I guess you can clean up the way you speak. Or you can just wait until your brand of bad becomes acceptable. You see it’s only a matter of time before ‘nu-clee-ar’ and ‘nuke-u-lar’ both become correct.

So I says, given enough time, the English portion of the S.A.T .’ll be easier than filling in your name. ‘Cause your name has to be right.

That’s it! That’s what ya oughta know.

I hope this message hasn’t come across to harsh....ly for all of you.