I got a little unbent at my wife the other night. Nothing that Amy did, I just needed to vent a little and she was sitting innocently at the kitchen table, ready to absorb a random barrage of Simon's venial annoyances. It had to do with music.
I think there's finally a song extant to usurp Alanis Morissette's long-held number one position atop my list of Worst Grammatical Offenders in music. I don't even know what the name of the goddamn thing is, and I can't be bothered to spend the five minutes it would take to search the thing on teh internets. It's that annoying to me.
I don't even know what most of the lyrics are, even though I've heard it a couple dozen times on the radio. That's because I can't get out of my head the part that scrapes its fingernails down the chalkboard of my English pedantry.
The very short bit goes thus: "Are we human... or are we dancer?"
That's it. That's all I can recall from the song. On top of that, the singer performs it in a voice that is a sort of soporific lament to existential angst, which only exacerbates the grammatical travesty. The combination of those two factors makes me want to jam a sharpened No. 2 pencil into each ear and burn Stephen King books to keep alive my guttering hatred for blatant language abuses in the name of art. (Nothing against King's books; his name just goes well with the pencil-in-ear scenario.)
Referring to "we" as a single dancer somehow grates against my entire being, and I can't quite place why that is. "Dancer" should be plural, obviously. Dancers. Then the line would scan just fine. "We" can all be human, speaking about mankind as a race. Or "we" can be humans, individually. Either of those is fine. But "we" can only ever be dancers; we can never be dancer.
If I ever start up a rock band, I plan to call it "Strunk & White".
*****
OK, fine, I looked it up on YouTube.