Monday, March 7, 2011

stay where you're at & I'll come where you're to

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a super hero named Captian Question Mark? He could spell his name like this:

Captain?

You pronounce the question mark.

He could have his own television show, called The Grammatical Conundrums of Captain?. If that doesn't draw the younger demographic, I don't know what will. And he could have a theme song. Like this:

Captain?,
is that a comma splice? Hark!
Dangling participles make him cry;
Split Infinitive's a bad guy;
using poor grammar only reveals that
ending a sentence with a preposition proves your low intelligence...at.

Try humming your little tyke to sleep with that one.

In each episode, Captain? can show how urgently one should understand proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

For example, in one episode, Captain?'s arch nemesis Split Infinitive (notorious for misusing the English language and leading a gang of rebellious high school drop-outs, who named themselves "Slang," in removing the apostrophe from the Handbook of Vital Punctuation, and also for using run-on sentences), has been locked in a bunker full of explosives, and in a shocking state of humility (and possibly desperation), texts Captain? for help. Captain?, of course, being good-spirited, compassionate, and an overall very nice super hero, agrees to help. Let's take a peek at the rest of the conversation:

SI: Thx cpt? your gr8
C?: My great what?
SI: no. . .your great
C?: My great...grandmother? My great sense of style? My great ideas on exploding cigarettes, so that when people toss them from their car windows it results in immediate consequences? "Your great" is not a complete sentence.
SI: Look I foot have time 2 argue about grammar rite now
C?: I understand. In which case, the most important thing to remember so you don't die is.
SI: Is what???
C?: What?
SI: u didnt text me a complete sentence
C?: Well neither did you, so I suppose we're even.

Kids will learn several things from this episode:
1.) T9 is not reliable, so always proofread your texts.
2.) Compassion only goes as far as a willingness to speak and write properly.
3.) Proper punctuation and spelling are worth the extra effort, because otherwise you might blow up. (Also, I would stay away from throwing your cigarettes out the car window, just in case that idea actually came to fruition.)

Maybe Captain? can have a girlfriend, too. She can be a princess named Pun. She writes songs using word play and has a lot of folksy emotional baggage. Or is that Jason Mraz?

You see, every epic tale is only one worth telling if it is grammatically correct. Would Frodo have destroyed the Ring if Elrond had said, "It must be thrown into the fiery chasm from whence it came from"? No way would Frodo have accepted a mission from a guy who used two of the same prepositions in his sentence. Keep that in mind for the future, and remember: The future is only ours as long as the apostrophe still makes things possessive.

(That's how Captain? ends his shows, after he addresses the audience about how only you can prevent punctuation mutilation.)

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