The King’s English

Webster: “The King’s English – worthy to be spoken in the court of the king.”

So….in my city, the only court we talk about involves either a basketball or a judge and jury. But as a teacher with a degree in English, I have to practice such RESTRAINT when I encounter, about nine hundred times a day, someone speaking (or writing) incorrectly. I wonder if math majors get frustrated when they stand behind someone in the grocery store line who struggles counting out change, for example, or if they’re even aware that some of us despise balancing a checkbook.

That must be difficult, too, but lately I’m becoming more and more impatient when I turn on the television and hear something like this:

“There’s a strong connection between he and I.” (That little gem shows up EVERY week on the The Bachelor. That should be incentive enough to want to determine the correct usage…who wants to talk like THEM?) Back to that later.

Now…here are the top five things that make me bite my lips to keep from presenting an impromptu grammar lesson.

5- “A lot” is TWO WORDS. Two!

You don’t write “alittle” so why do folks insist on writing “alot” a lot? I used to have seventh graders chant, “A lot is two words. A lot is two words.” I bet they hate me to this day.

4-“Your” is not “You’re.”

I see this one every day on different social media sites. The King didn’t even use contractions back then so go ahead and write out “You are” if you can’t keep it straight.

At a school? Say it ain’t so!!!

3-Same thing with “their,” “they’re,” and “there” – They’re from a homophone lesson in third grade. Come on. You know you remember Mrs. Elmore explaining that to you. Wait. I had Mrs. Elmore in third grade. But you get it.

2-There’s a reason your computer auto-capitalizes the pronoun “I.” Unless you’re e e cummings and use your lack of capitalization as an element of your poetry, just capitalize it. And go ahead and capitalize the first word in any sentence. And if it’s a proper noun or adjective, that’s gonna need to be capitalized, too. Please don’t tell me you speak english…or spanish. Or that you eat french fries. I swear I’ll cry.

1- My number one pet peeve is the use of subject pronouns as objects. A professor I had said folks try to compensate for not understanding the usage by trying to sound more formal and adding that “I” to the end. It makes me crazy.

So, people. Oh my goodness. The pronouns “he” and “I”, as well as “she,” for that matter, can only serve as the subject of the sentence, not an object of any preposition. Let’s say you want to say, “She gave it to he and I.” As a test, just drop one of the pronouns: “She gave it to he” or “She gave it to I.” See? You know that’s not right. The correct sentence is “She gave it to him and me.”

So those are the ones that get to me the most. Of course, I also feel faint when people throw commas at a sentence like glitter in a Ke$ha video. But I’ll save that discussion for later.