{"id":12271,"date":"2012-02-20T21:22:34","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T02:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=12271"},"modified":"2012-02-21T09:00:44","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T14:00:44","slug":"grammatically-grating-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/grammatically-grating-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Grammatically Grating Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KJlVirycg-0?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>On the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/rock-town-hall%E2%80%99s-saturday-night-shut-in-i-actually-know-something\/\" target=\"_blank\">most-recent episode of <em>Saturday Night Shut-In<\/em><\/a> I promised to tell the story of breaking up a fight between our 2 boys minutes before my wife and I departed the house for yet another delicious meal at <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.levirtu.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Le Virtu<\/a><\/strong>, a restaurant in South Philadelphia owned by 2 old friends, Rusty and Cathy. A few of you wrote me off list, disappointed that I did not ever get around to telling this story. I apologize. I was caught up in the flow of the show and lost track of my note to share that tale. Here goes, and a resulting thread suggested by the owners of Le Virtu follows!<\/p>\n<p>So my wife and I had our coats on and were leaving the boys their instructions\/reminders for the couple of hours they&#8217;d be spending alone when suddenly our older son had our younger son in a headlock&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Tell him that &#8216;Come Sail Away&#8217; is a terrible song!&#8221; our older son shouted up from the headlock he was applying.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But I like it!&#8221; our younger son managed to squeeze out from the headlock being applied.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Boys,&#8221; my wife and I said in unison, &#8220;break it up!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, Daddy, I know Styx is bad but I like that song,&#8221; our little guy said as soon as his head was free.<\/p>\n<p>Big brother jumped in: &#8220;That&#8217;s not fair, when I was his age you never would have let me get away with that!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He likes it,&#8221; I tried to explain, &#8220;because of its use in an episode of <em>Freaks and Geeks<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t have accepted that excuse from me,&#8221; our teenager replied, disgustedly.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t have a big brother,&#8221; said my wife, &#8220;so your father had to play this role for you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He bought that answer. There was peace in the foyer, and we could get on the road to our dinner. That woman&#8217;s a genius!<\/p>\n<p>At dinner we chatted with Cathy, telling her about this episode with the boys, who are also big fans of the restaurant. Then she told us that Rusty still has it in for me over my inability to embrace <strong>Cheap Trick<\/strong>. Then she told me the story surrounding &#8220;Come Sail Away&#8221; reminded her of one of their pet peeves, and a thread we may not have ever covered: songs with <strong>grammatically gratingly lyrics<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>She said Rusty was constantly disgusted by Styx&#8217;s &#8220;Come Sail Away,&#8221; beyond all that is wrong with the song itself, by the chorus&#8217; switch to the singular after a plural set up:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A gathering of Angels appeared above my head<br \/>\nThey sang to me this song of hope and this is what they said:<br \/>\nThey said, &#8220;Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me lads<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;It should be &#8216;come sail away with us,'&#8221; Rusty can&#8217;t help grumbling.<\/p>\n<p>Another song that gets their goat is <strong>Paul McCartney<\/strong>&#8216;s &#8220;Live and Let Die&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And in this ever-changing world in which we live in&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Why?&#8221; Cathy asked rhetorically, &#8220;It&#8217;s just wrong!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So leaving out songs purposely or sincerely written in a grammatically questionable vernacular, <em>what song&#8217;s lyrics really bug the English major in you<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the most-recent episode of Saturday Night Shut-In I promised to tell the story of breaking up a fight between our 2 boys minutes before my wife and I departed the house for yet another delicious meal at Le Virtu, a restaurant in South Philadelphia owned by 2 old friends, Rusty and Cathy. A few <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/grammatically-grating-songs\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[204,595],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}