worse verse as Grammar set text?

[Jonathan Lighter]

NYC subway ads for Alfred Hitchcock's flight of fantasy _The Birds_ (1964) carried the unpunctuated slogan, "The birds is coming !"

When the film was lampooned by _Mad_ magazine, an asterisk appeared to add in smaller print, "And good grammar has went !"

Grammatically, the sentence was fine; it was good punctuation that had went. In the case of Windows, both look right to me.

James's poem, however, reads good like a satire should.

JL


neil <neil at TYPOG.CO.UK> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: neil
Subject: worse verse as Grammar set text?
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'A poet [,,,] must master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or
break them.'
--Robert Graves, letter to 'The Times', 1961 (cited by David Crystal, 'The
Stories of English', Allen Lane, London, 2004, 182)

Clive James rush in where angels fears to tread!

Saturday Poem by Clive James
WINDOWS IS SHUTTING DOWN

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

--The Guardian Review, 30 April 2005, 36

--Neil Crawford

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