Full Frontal Grammar Rant — The Return!

What I liked least about Tiger Woods’ press conference was that he kept pronouncing the indefinite article — a — to rhyme with day, rather than the last syllable of algebra. This is sort of endearing when a second-grader does it, and really stilted and annoying for anyone older. And yes, I am indeed including Mr. Obama.

With my phenomenal memory, I can fairly lucidly remember the first time I thought this. I was myself a third grader at the time, at Loyola Village School, the first elementary school north of Los Angeles International Airport. A bunch of us young scholars were seated in a semicircle, and a sort of doughy boy named Douglas Treadway, with whom I never had any dealings of note, read from Fun With Dick and Jane, or whichever other novel we happened to be considering that day, pronouncing a each time as though beginning to recite the alphabet. I can’t recall the name of the next boy to read — so much for my phenomenal memory! — but do recall that he had a troublemaker’s duck’s-ass coiffure. I found his reading aloud revelatory, exhilarating; he dared to pronounce the indefinite article as we did in real life!

People imagining that I is preferable to me in every instance also annoys me. Take (please!) that Doors song I used to hate so much, the one containing the lines I’m going to love you ‘til the stars fall from the sky for you and I. Every time I heard it, I felt as though in a Styrofoam factory; there is no sound in the world more upsetting to me than the shriek of Styrofoam. But I found it less excruciating than this, from "We Are the World".

We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day
Just you and me

I could forgive its ungrammaticality if the vowel sound of the would-have-been-correct I didn’t exactly match that of the antecedent lives. It’s as though Michael and Lionel set out to annoy me! I thought for decades I’d never have to hear it again, and then Haiti had the nerve to be devastated!

I very much dislike when someone addresses a group of women, or even a sexually mixed group, as guys, and cringe when athletes keep sticking the same superfluous word into their interviews. “I think we’ve got one heckuva football team, and that if we execute and nobody gets hurt, why, we can win this football game.” As opposed to a heck of a synchronized swimming team, Coach? As opposed to a game of gin rummy?

I believe that precocious and pro blush, from "Bette Davis Eyes", may be the most egregiously awful attempt at a rhyme in the history of popular music. God knows you hear dreadful rhymes every time your turn on the radio, but has there ever been one more convinced of its own great cleverness?

I very much dislike when people get quote/unquote wrong, and who have you ever heard get it right? What you hear all the time is something like “We blame the quote unquote civil unrest on outside agitators,” which looks, transcribed, like this: We blame the “” civil unrest on outside agitators. (What you want is "quote civil unrest unquote".)

And another thing! In the UK, the end-quote goes after the punctuation (“...on outside agitaors”.) Here, we stupidly put in inside, though I must tell you that I’ve been rebelling the last couple of months, and doing it the British way, and nobody seems to have noticed, much as I’ve been spelling my surname with and without two s’s since 1979 now without anyone noticing.

I grumble audibly when Simon Cowell says something like, “That’s the worst singing I’ve ever heard in my life.” If it’s the worst singing he’s ever heard, I think it’s a pretty safe bet it’s the worst he’s heard in his life. Similarly, I hate big signs on the front of businesses that proclaim, “Now open!” If they said only “open,” would people drive past, imagining the places to be closed? I believe if we stopped squandering person-hours painting superfluous nows on signs, we could afford universal health care.

God, it’s been good to be in full rant mode again. It’s been too long!

Mystery Man in Brangelina Split Named

What you’ve heard about Angelina and Brad is true. They’re breaking up. I know because I’m the guy she’s leaving him for.

I can guess what you’re thinking. “He was sort of cute in a saturnine semitic way decades ago, but time hasn’t been kind to him.” The fact is that after five years of You-Know-Who, though, Ange has had her fill of pretty. Now she wants mordant and depressive and much older. She wants what she used to have with Billy Bob Thornton, except without the weird stuff. I haven’t asked her to get my name tattooed on the most intimate part of herself. I haven’t given her a vial of my blood to wear around her neck. All I’ve given here are a corsage, and my heart. I have a rare blood type.

We met three months ago in the small produce section of the only supermarket on Beacon’s Main Street, Key Food. It’s really expensive. Most ghetto supermarkets are expensive. Beacon isn’t a ghetto. There are as many fine artists here as welfare queens or crack dealers, and as many drag queens as welfare queens. If you want ghetto, you have to cross the river to Newburgh. But nobody wants ghetto, not really. The slurring white punks in their baggy pants and backward baseball caps and necklaces may think they do, but they don’t. As I write this, the river is frozen.

She was looking at onions. There were red ones and the other, more typical kind. I can’t imagine that she does her own cooking, but it was none of my business. I figured she had it up to here with perfect strangers questioning her. She noticed me staring. She smiled. Her famous lips looked even more lubricious than in photographs. I wanted to kiss them, but I gave her space.

I pretended to need pasta. It was in a different part of the store. She followed me. Don’t think I wasn’t flattered. There were other men doing their grocery shopping, lonely, single men. A man with a woman wouldn’t have shopping for groceries. He’d have been at home fixing things. He'd have been hunting or fishing.

She asked if I had a favorite shape. I said I’d always liked Jayne Mansfield’s. She said, “No, smartass, for pasta, I mean.” There was a twinkle in her eye when she said it. I said but what about You-Know-Who? She said not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I filled her. Neither of us smoked afterward. We have too much self-respect.

She liked that I’d dated famous actresses in the past. Morgan Fairchild and I were an item at one point. There have been others. Famous actresses like a man who doesn’t ask for their autograph. They like men they can’t intimidate, and who are unintimidatd enough to tease them. Jen used to love my pronouncing her surname Anus-town. She'd pretend otherwise, but her laughter gave her away.

She introduced me to her six children. I had a child of my own once. I didn’t get along only with Maddox and Pax and Knox, but also with the ones lacking an x at the end, Zahara, Shiloh, and Vivienne. I asked if she and You-Know-Who had considered naming one of the twins Barbecue since they were so crazy about unusual names. She didn’t get it. “Barbecue Pitt,” I said.

The look she gave me made me feel chastened. There used to be a famous restaurant in Beverly Hills called Chasen’s. Ange’s estranged dad, Jon Voight, might have gone there with his agent. Ange was probably too young to have been there. They were famous for their chili, of all things. Elizabeth Taylor had a bathtubful of it flown to Rome when she was shooting Cleopatra. She thought immersing herself in it kept her skin soft. This was well before Michael Jackson. Some people think Ange would make a good Cleopatra. Some people used to think You-Know-Who would make a good Achilles. No one ever thought Michael Jackson would.

We’re taking it one day at a time, though neither of us is an alcoholic. I’m writing tersely today, with almost no adverbs. I haven’t even mentioned my huge backlog of unjustly unproduced screenplays. There will be time for that later, or there won’t. It isn’t mine to know.

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