Weird Al Yankovic’s new parody “Word Crimes” is chock-full of grammar advice — but is it good advice?
Or is it just a three-minute-long language peeve session? What should we take from the song, and what should best be left alone?
Linguist Daniel Midgley tells you what you need to know on this episode of Talk the Talk.
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Show notes
End of the OED — in print, anyway.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/10777079/RIP-for-OED-as-worlds-finest-dictionary-goes-out-of-print.html
Watch Word Crimes by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
The lyrics:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/weirdalyankovic/wordcrimes.html
Here are 25 questions you can ask yourself about the video.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13521
It all makes John McWhorter want to give up.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/23/the-problem-with-weird-al-s-word-crimes-video.html
Less or fewer?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html
It was all the preference of a single author.
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/
And really, people say ‘less [items]’ all the time.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2826
Even so, grammar pedants successfully pressured Tesco on this issue
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2659948/Tesco-to-ditch-ten-items-or-less-sign-after-good-grammar-campaign.html
Lots of phrases don’t make sense, but we never seem to complain about them because we’re used to them.
http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t117548.html
Like ‘head over heels’.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hea3.htm
Jefferson used it’s where we would think its.
http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/tree-liberty-quotation
You see, its has changed.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=its
Expresso
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/saundspel/conversations/topics/64704
The Oxford comma has some use.
http://thewritepractice.com/why-you-need-to-be-using-oxford-commas/
Although even Oxford doesn’t use it in some cases, so maybe we should call it the ‘serial comma’.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/oxford-comma_n_887658.html
Homophones have converged.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/164527/is-there-a-term-for-the-convergent-evolution-of-homonyms
The etymology of ‘lightning’
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=lightning
Oxt.
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/16/5901883/oxt-new-word-weekend
Let’s do something oxt weekend.
http://oxtweekend.com/
