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Thank heaven for April. After a hard winter, we can finally crawl out of our holes and thank all the gods that be for spring.
No wonder April is such a religious month, named for the goddess Venus (from her Greek name Aphrodite). Every week this month you can find a major religious celebration — Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh and Baha’i.
April is also National Poetry Month, but to remind us that nothing is perfect — not even April — April 15 is Tax Day.
Despite the fervor of religious holidays, we are still human, our feet stumbling along the ground. And, despite the eloquent prayers and beautiful poems floating heavenward this month, we still manage to mangle our native language.
I have, therefore and hereby, crafted a special April prayer for our American English language — namely, the perfection and preservation of it, evermore.
“O God, who has demonstrated a love for language through your preachers and prophets who use it so enthusiastically and even, on occasion, excessively,
“Look with favor, we beseech thee, on thy lowly creation — the objective case — which suffers so grievously in this current American culture.
“Let not the compound pronoun of the objective case be lost and fade from this beauteous earth, tromped underfoot by carelessness.
“Let not the sluggard tongue of mankind (also womankind and childrenkind) obliterate entirely the tiny words, ‘her,’ ‘him’ and ‘me.’ Rather, let these pronouns continue to be beautiful in Your sight in the objective case.
“To wit, I humbly offer the correct example: ‘Give the albatross to her and me’ and not ‘Give the albatross to she and I.’ Hear my plea when I ask you to smite all of them — note that I did not say ‘all of they’ — who speak such abominations.
“And speaking of ‘they’ and ‘them,’ O God, turn Your brooding eye over the pagan use of ‘they’ and ‘their’ in reference to singular subjects. Namely, this incorrect example: ‘The women’s club is holding their meeting today.’ O Lord, you know how evil that is to the ear. Strike down the secretary of that women’s club, O Lord, for not saying, ‘The women’s club is holding its meeting today.’
“And not just club secretaries, O God, but unleash the full fury of your linguistic wrath on mass media, print and especially television reporters who defame the English language so atrociously.
“Likewise let not verbs and nouns be mingled in our mouths. Let us never again hear a radio reporter say during the Olympic games that a skier did not ‘medal’ today, meaning that the skier did not win a medal. O woe unto the reporter who forced a noun to do a verb’s work. Yea, I say unto you, that reporter failed more grievously than did the skier.
“Suffer the little children of this nation not to hear such errors. Neither let us adults hear it either and please note, O Lord, that I did not say, ‘Neither let we adults hear it.’ That incorrect pronoun usage would be a dagger to thy ear. Rather, let us (not we) rejoice with gladness that we (not us) know the difference between subjective and objective case.
“Dear God, we are the sheep of your pasture and you recall the pain and suffering we endured in Mrs. Simpson’s sixth-grade English class to learn these enduring lessons of subject-verb agreement. How we were made to let the pronouns, yea even the compound pronouns in the objective case, leap like gazelles among our little sentences. Even until the ends of time.
“Visit, we ask you, other Mrs. Simpsons — or like English teachers — on these heathens of the language of the King James Bible, ‘The Elements of Style’ and other goodly books. Correct them. Guide them along the right grammar path. Or strike them mute. At least when they are within my earshot.
“All this we ask you in the name of all that is Right and Holy and Grammatically Correct.
“For as we were taught, in the beginning was the Word and our supplication is that we not live to hear the ending of the correct Word as we know and love it. Amen.”
