inspiration for English teachers everywhere

[Lynne Murphy]

 From the gossip column in Salon today:


MANSON TO FANS: MUTILATE YOUR BODY, NOT YOUR LANGUAGE

Judging from Marilyn Manson's questionable actions over the years -- peeing
on fans, sniffing coke off terlet seats, once even finding himself
moved to cover a naked blind groupie with luncheon meats -- you might
conclude that nothing disgusts him. But you'd be wrong.

Quite a few things repulse the self-mutilating Satanist: Jerry Springer ("I'm
amazed to see how backward humans have gone on the evolutionary chart," he
says, apparently without a hint of irony), rap music ("It's not
really advancing
any sort of art form") and people who "stir up shit just for the sake
of stirring up shit," for instance.

But if there's one thing that really gets under his elaborately decorated skin,
Manson tells Talk magazine, it's bad grammar; it really "offends" him. "Bad
grammar ... makes me more pissed than anything in the world, as someone who
respects the educational system or someone who just respects the way things
are intended to be in America," he says. "We have the ability. There's no
reason that people can't simply use decent grammar."

And he's no fan of profanity, either. "If every other word is
'fuck,'" he inquires,"then what's the barometer of fuckness? It's
like, if everyone was cool, what would the point of cool be?"


--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320