One of my students recently mentioned that I hadn’t posted on this blog since last August. I’d stopped due to a combination of an increased workload and a feeling that nobody ever read it, but he’s now given me the motivation to start up again.
This evening I went to Pizzeria Poli and got myself a Capricioasa pizza, topped with ham, mushrooms and olives. It was cut into six slices, which was just as well, because I never could have eaten eight. That last sentence was a joke, by the way – obviously you get the same amount of pizza no matter how it’s sliced. It’s also an example of a Yogi-ism, something that the famous baseball player Yogi Berra supposedly said.
Here are some other famous Yogi Berra quotes:
- It ain’t over till it’s over.
- The future ain’t what it used to be. (I should do a post on the word “ain’t” some time.)
- Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours.
- Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.
- When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
- Nobody goes there nowadays; it’s too crowded.
Berra died in 2015 at the age of 90, but his quotes, of which you can find many more online, live on.
While I was waiting for my pizza, a song called Him & I, by G-Eazy and Halsey (whoever they are) was playing on the radio. I no longer have the faintest clue about modern mainstream music. The title of the track, “Him and I”, really stood out for me, because it’s grammatically incorrect. Song lyrics often deviate from what you find in a grammar book, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Unusual use of language can often make a song sound better, in fact. But what’s strange about Him & I is that the error is in the title, and repeated 22 times throughout the song, if the lyrics I’m looking at now are to be believed.
What’s wrong with “him and I”? Well, him is an object pronoun and I is a subject pronoun. When you have two pronouns together, joined by “and”, they must both be either subject or object pronouns. You can’t mix them. You must say either “him and me” (both object pronouns) or “he and I” (both subject pronouns). Here are some examples of correct sentences:
- There is a big age gap between him and me.
- It was getting late, and everybody had gone home except him and me.
- He and I don’t really get along.
- He and I each had three slices of pizza.
I sat down on a bench in the Botanic Park to eat my pizza. With spring finally in the air after a late winter, it’s lovely there. On the bench, someone with a good command of English had penned some amusing graffiti:
There are several puns here. A pun is a play on words.
On the left we’ve got some much-needed encourage-mint, then we’ve got a rather funny Single Bells version of the famous Jingle Bells Christmas carol. Next there appears to be some kind of meme, where telling someone to step on Lego is a way of wishing pain on a person, because as we all know, stepping on Lego is very painful indeed. (Note that in the British English that I grew up speaking, Lego was uncountable. I never would have said “a Lego”.) Then we have a shivering, and relatively small, chili pepper. He or she is a little chili! (That’s a pun on a little chilly, meaning “a bit cold”.) Finally we have a seal, saying “I approve”. Presumably this seal is giving his or her, um, seal of approval.
That’s all for me for now, but stay tuned!