Journeyman

First I took the high road, then I took the low road,
(But I found the middle of the road is barely worth a mention.)
I hit and hogged and kicked-the-can upon the long and winding road
That’s sometimes paved with yellow bricks, and sometimes good-intentions.

Yet how many must a man walk down before they make him ?
This hard road to Damascus is a lonely trial of tears.
Please don’t lead to Rome again, but to the road not taken,
For the golden road to Samarkand begins at Wigan Pier.

Ah idioms, where would language be without jargon ?  This poem is so early, I was still allowing myself to slip in post-rhyme esses (tearS and pier), which I’m much stricter about these days, although they do still crop-up where to avoid them would make the syntax tortured (though usually in the also-rhyme position [lines 1 and 3], with a cleaner pairing on the prime-rhymes).

Propersome Grammar

To take the example of gotten,
Grammaticists so much malign
This useful past participle
Whose use was once most rife and fine.
Crossing oceans, forth it went,
Yet back at home its usage fell
A shorter version came in vogue
That was but little used till now.
And yet these language experts
Who tell us how to speak forthhence
Forget this evolution,
Forget that English is not French.
They try to stop the creeping changes,
Battle hard against the rot.
“If we don’t keep our English pure,
Well, what then have we got ?”

Language has long fascinated me, and here’s an early attempt of spinning some obscure lingual trivia into half a page, a useful fallback still when Mr Block comes to call.  The bit about English not being French is a reference to l’Académie Française, (that’s right, Immortals, I capitalised the adjective – deal with it !)  I heartily hope that the average Francophone ignores them with rigour.  I’m sure an English equivalent would simply hate ‘forthhence’, though maybe with good reason on this occasion.

Scharfes Ess

I don’t care what you tell me,
It’s a B !,
Whatever Germans see.
A Beta-B, a bit more curvy,
Cool and verve-y,
Filigree.
This ligature is formal dress,
A symbol of the bourgeoisie.

But who could guess that it’s an S ?
Well, okay, two, that you compress
(or is it three…?)
Enough !
Don’t squeeze your esses into messes,
Let each ess breathe free !
And let’s supress this guff, unless,
We let it be a B !

I almost called this poem βcharfeβ-Eβ.

Pissing on the Pedants

Do you remember, back in school,
When teachers, parents, busybodies,
Told us, told us, told us how
Our grammar shamed our tongues ?
They called us slovenly and coarse,
No better than the brats of squaddies –
Smacked our hands and clipped our ears
And bellowed out their lungs.

They were wrong.  So wrong.
On ev’ry single point they taught.
Wrong that we couldn’t,
And wrong that we wouldn’t
And wrong that we cared what they thought.

Sometimes we mixed up laying and lying,
Or fewer and less,
But I guess that we just didn’t care.
The meaning was clear from the context,
As clearly as there is from their is from they’re.

We thunk and we brung and we beated –
The more they cared, the less we core.
And even today, they get heated,
But they can’t clip our ears no more.