booshink

Just when I thought I had my bad-grammar obsession under control I started hearing the following ad on the radio:

Are you one of the 43 million plus Americans who don’t have health care insurance? Then call 123 Healthcare, where getting affordable benefits are as easy as 123. (The emphases are mine.)

When I hear something such as this it depresses me. Who wrote this and, worse yet, who edited it and approved it and how can they hear it aired day after day and not run screaming into their boss’s office and yell, “Please stop that ad! I made a terrible mistake! Someone who really cares about our language may hear it and do something drastic and I would never be able to forgive myself!”? I am not going to elaborate on what is wrong with this excerpt - either you will notice it (with or without my hints) right away or not. If not, then stop now and go back to your People magazine.

The previous example is just bad grammar, but then there’s this -

Compare Transam to any company out there and they just don’t stack up.

This is an ad promoting a company called Transam. Hard to tell, isn’t it? This excerpt is grammatically correct but demonstrates faulty syntax which is really a sign of faulty logic. No one at Transam seems to care, though.

Here’s another that just irritates the hell out of me. No grammar or syntax problems but, still, it is just wrong.

Do you know the difference between the millions of millionaires in America and you? They decided they wanted to be millionaires and went out and did it.

What did they go out and do? Where did they go to do it? Can I want to be a millionaire and just stay home and do it?

Then there’s this exciting statement by Billy Ray Cyrus promoting some new Nashville talent show -

I hold in my hand the next Nashville star!

Big hands, huh? One of the contestants replies -

Just every week you have to bring it.

Huh?

And, finally, a proud husband has this to say about his wife who has been using a new face cream -

I looked at her and I was just wow!

Well, he may have been just wow but I am just disgusted and depressed. ‘Bye.

I drive a truck for a living: a big truck - the kind with 18 wheels. James Taylor once wrote in a song, “Mr. 9 to 5 in your Coup De Ville will never know how it feels to really roll roll roll.” I roll. I have been reluctant to reveal that information (that I’m a trucker) on this blog for some reason. Maybe I thought that whatever readers there were who might stumble across this site might think less of me for it. Pretty insecure, huh? That’s not all I’ve ever done for a living in my life and times, though. I’ve been a carpenter, a salesman, a manager, a teacher, a sailor, a cab driver and some other things I won’t mention. I have a bachelor’s degree in Music and an MA in teaching (English). Some of my favorite things are reading, writing, classical guitar, chess and fly fishing. But truck driving seems to stick. I keep coming back to it. What’s the point of all this? I don’t know. Maybe if I keep writing I’ll come up with something.

Back in 1982 when I went on the road for the first time, it was fun and exciting. Everyday was something new - new places and new things. I remember the first time I came over the mountains at night and saw Las Vegas below, lighting up the desert or rolled down I-10 into LA. I still love to drive through the desert at night. I remember drinking with an old Indian in Whitefish Montana and driving down Park Avenue in NYC.

Maine to Miami, San Diego to Seattle and everything in between. I’ve ridden down the old Route 66 from east to west and come down Cabbage Pass with no brakes. It’s a lonely life and a hard one and it’s starting to tell on me. Caffeine and nicotine keep me going now. Used to be reefer and amphetamines. Bad food and long lonely nights. Most of the good old truck stops and diners are gone now, too. Everything now is slick and sterile. No character.

I’m getting tired of the road. Mainly I hate public restrooms, fast food and being away from home. And the traffic is terrible. Everybody going nowhere real fast. I just take it slow and easy and kind of let the rest of the world go by. I don’t get in a hurry. No need to.

The fine moments of surprise and excitement are few and far between now. But sometimes I open my eyes and see white fluffy clouds in a sharp blue sky or snow-capped mountains in mid-summer or an old country lane going nowhere or a storm building out over the Gulf and I think, “It could be worse. I could have a real job.”

It’s honest work. We’re paid by the mile and we earn every dollar we make and it seems lately that we are mostly disrespected and misunderstood. We are probably among the most well informed people in America. Heck, we listen to the radio 24 hours a day, including NPR and Coast to Coast. If you have any doubt that we know a lot of stuff, just ask any one of us. We’ll tell you all about it.

I’m looking for a way out of it (the truck) now. I ride along and dream of having a little office in town and giving guitar lessons and doing computer work - maybe playing a gig now and then. I’m good at English. Maybe I could open an English shop. I could sell footnotes, undangle dangling participles and re-place misplaced modifiers. I live on (what could be) a small farm. I’d like to raise goats and chickens and grow organic vegetables.

But I’m too young to retire and too broke and scared to quit. There are bills to be paid. And the road is still out there, like a siren, singing its bittersweet song. And maybe, just maybe, there’ll be something new around the next bend.

I was thinking about grits the other day. I thought about eating grits at my grandmother’s house when we were all there. I remember my uncle Bill teasing my wife because her’s (her grits) were too thin. He said you could eat them through a straw. She makes them just right now: thick and with just enough salt. He put sugar on his. I loved Bill, but sugar on grits, in my mind, is just not right.

I was thinking that it would be neat to open a place and sell nothing but grits. I would call it, uh, Grits. I would have a grits buffet - grits and all the toppings. Butter (for the stout-hearted) and margarine (for the dainties) and cheese and bacon and country ham and red-eye gravy and salmon patties and grilled shrimp and sardines and buttered toasted biscuits with jelly and cane syrup to go along with it all.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but down in Louisiana the other day what should I read about but grits buffets. The article was in the lifestyles section of the paper and it seems that grits buffets are all the rage now for parties and entertaining among those in the know in Baton Rouge. See, I’m not out of touch.

Grits. It will take the country, heck, the world by storm. I will become rich and famous - an entrepreneurial guru. People will come to me for wisdom and advice and - grits. And I will not forget my humble beginnings nor the advice of my uncle Bill: make them thick enough to stand a spoon up in.

I once came upon a man as I was walking down an old forgotten road. He was walking, too.

He said, “Come with me and I will take you places you have never been.”

I said, “I have been a lot of places and I am tired of traveling.”

“Come, then, and I will show you things you have never seen.”

“I have seen so many things until I am almost tired of seeing.”

He said, “Well, what, then?”

I said, “Tell me something I have never heard. Something real and true.”

He said, “We must stop for that. Here, under this tree.”

We sat and then he said, “Son, it has been many years and many miles that has brought us to this particular place and time.”

I said, “Well, that’s true enough. Is that all?”

“Yes”

I was ready to go. I asked, “What’s down the end of this road?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is that where you’re going?”

“You mean nowhere?”

“No. I mean to the end of the road.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll go with you that far, anyway.”

(Transcribed from notes recorded on March 18.)

I carry notebooks with me all the time. I have a small pocket-size Moleskine, a large Moleskine, a Notabilia and a large ledger. This is probably more notebooks than I should carry about, mainly because I’m always undecided over what to put in what notebook. I sometimes just sit and stare blankly at an empty page or copy stuff from one notebook to another and I generally spend more time just messing with the books than I do writing in them.

Now I’m starting to really be concerned about what I write. Times past, I would just jot down anything that popped into my head. Now I imagine people actually reading my notes (particularly my wife and kids) in the event of my death - an event I am becoming increasingly expectant of. I imagine my audience, then, as a body of curious mourners looking through my pitiful notes after my untimely death. I want them to find something promising and uplifting and that will reveal my inner-self to them in the best possible light. A tough chore. I probably should just stop writing stuff down altogether.

To make matters worse, I now have a blog. Stuff I put there is immediately accessible not only to them (my family) but to the whole online world. “We must consider our audience,” the experts say, but sometimes I feel safer and more comfortable imagining my only audience is me. “Why, then, write at all?” one might ask and I will have to ponder that for awhile and get back later on that.

Later -

I suppose the main reason I write is because I want to be a writer. Someone (Stephen King, I think) said, “A writer writes.” That makes perfect sense and is probably good enough reason, but the truth is that I want to connect with someone. I want someone to read something that I have written and say, “Yeah!” Another reason I write is it helps me “get stuff out.” Stuff such as now, March 18, 2008, as I sit here, the only customer in this Chinese restaurant at mid-afternoon on a cold, rainy day in Canton, OH and listen to the bubbling of an aquarium, the soft oriental music, the banter from the kitchen and feel my loneliness. Now, at my age, I realize there is nothing romantic about loneliness. No song or excellent journal entry or movie or book can ever make it desirable to me again. I have had my fill of it.

Sometimes loneliness can lead to despair- sometimes other things can lead there. Things such as finding out yesterday that my sister’s husband, Billy, had died after a long battle with cancer and the knowing that I have been more or less estranged from her and him and my brother and most of all my family for several years now for reasons too painful for me to write about now or probably forever and the fact that I am far from home and will probably not make it there for the funeral and that I would probably not go if I were home. And sometimes loneliness and despair can lead to depression and keep me there in its dark gloomy embrace until I break free, back to the light. And sometimes writing helps; helps get me back.

I write because I am a writer: because writing affirms that. “A writer writes.” It’s just that simple. And perhaps because my thoughts, sometimes feverishly, most times clumsily, scribbled down on paper, in whatever notebook I choose, may be all that I leave behind.

Just got back from New York and have to leave early in the morning for Louisiana. Have lots of notes and ideas for posts but no time to get them in. Hope to get a few days off next time around. Bye.

I think my grammar posts must have turned a lot of people off so I will cease and desist from posting to that topic for now. I was really just trying to be helpful although, granted, I am sometimes guilty of projecting a rather sarcastic/sanctimonious tone. In other words, I sometimes tend to be a smart-ass.

Sorry.

This announcement was posted in a local restaurant:

Due to the high velocity of returned checks, we can now only accept cash or credit/debit cards. Thanks.

I just wonder if anyone has been injured.

Todd Davis, CEO of a company called LifeLock, made this announcement on the radio the other day:

“You are 25 times more likely to have your identity stolen than the car you are driving.”

Thank goodness. I’m not really too concerned about my identity, but I worry fretfully over that of my car. Thank you, Todd.

In this post I will discuss the Number One grammatical mistake that I hear and read these days. This mistake is made by nearly EVERYONE including respected journalists and reporters, writers, teachers, news-show anchor people, business leaders and politicians. The mistake involves the incorrect use of the pronouns I and me. I guess a lot of people have learned (incorrectly) that the pronoun I is more proper than the pronoun me. In an attempt to be proper, then, most people use I even when it is improper to do so. When people do this I want to slap them.

For example: “John reported to Mary and I that the price of eggs had gone up.” Wrong. Leave Mary out of it. Would you say “John reported to I that the price of eggs had gone up?” Well, you might, but you would deserve a slap if you did.

It’s simple: use I if it is or refers to the subject of the sentence; use me if it is the object of the sentence or the object of a preposition. The mistake usually occurs when there is another pronoun involved as in the example above. The easy fix is to test by leaving out the extra pronoun and see if it makes sense. “John reported to me (leaving out Mary) that the price of eggs had gone up.” This will almost always work.

Incorrect - “They sent Charlie and I an invitation.” They sent I an invitation? To what, a meeting of the grammatically impaired?

Correct - “They sent Charlie and me an invitation.” Use me because it is the object of the verb sent.

Incorrect - “Jim and me went to the store.” Huh? Me went to the store? Not even where I come from. Here you need the subjective (or nominative) pronoun I.

Correct - “Jim and I went to the store. I is the subject in this case so use the subjective pronoun I.

After all prepositions such as about, between, of, on, at, etc. use the objective pronoun me, never I.

Incorrect - “The story was about the King and I.” In this case the pronoun is the object of the preposition about. Test it. Leave the King out of it. “The story was about I.” Slap.

Correct - “The story was about the King and me.” Ahhh.

Incorrect - “The contest wound up being between John and I.” This one is just a little harder to test for but all you have to remember is that after between always use the objective pronoun me; or, substitute about for between and test it. Would you say “The contest was about I?” Not even where you come from.

Correct - “The contest wound up being between John and me.”

Summary

Don’t be afraid to use me.

Use I if it is or refers to the subject of the sentence.

Use me if it is a direct or indirect object or the object of a preposition.

Stop and think before you speak or write. Test to see if it sounds right using the methods mentioned above.

If someone near you uses I when they should have used me, slap them; then apologize and politely refer them to this post.