By Pat Cashman

Every time Star Trek fans hear those famous words spoken by Captain Kirk: “…to boldly go where no man has gone before…”---they get as giddy as mosquitoes in a nudist colony.

But if my college English teacher Miss Lynn had heard them, she would have howled in genuine pain. “What kind of a captain is that?” she’d say. “Even a Klingon wouldn’t speak so poorly.” (By the way, my computer just tried to change Klingon to Clinton. More on that shortly.)

Captain Kirk’s familiar words, of course, contain a dreaded split infinitive. Thus, “…to boldly go…”---with the word ‘boldly’ stuffed in between ‘to’ and ‘go’---is a crime worthy of marching Kirk straight to Miss Lynn’s grammar guillotine.

It was as if splitting an infinitive was a bigger deal than splitting the atom---and just as explosive.
I’ve long thought about writing a sketch for TV called “The Grammarian.” It would be about a righteous super-hero---in the requisite cape and tights---running around correcting wrong utterances:

EVIL GENIUS: “I will rule the world, irregardless!”
THE GRAMMARIAN: “You’re using an unnecessary prefix, Evil Genius! Irregardless is not even a word! You’re finished!”

Everybody makes occasional missteps in the rudiments of the English language. Even Shakespeare wrote, “This was the most unkindest cut of all.” That remark was---as most Shakespearean scholars already know---the double superlative Marc Antony uttered as Julius Caesar reached for a Band-Aid.

When I was a kid, it seemed we spent lots of time in the classroom learning all the rules of proper grammar---and the rest of the time listening to popular music that couldn’t have cared less about it:
James Brown sang “I Feel Good”---in blatant defiance of the more proper “I Feel Well.”
Kris Kristofferson---a Rhodes scholar mind you---wrote a song called “Me and Bobby McGee.” Sure it’s probably grammatically fine---but some would still say that “Bobby McGee and I” somehow sounds more correct. If so, changing Bobby’s last name to McGuy would solve the rhyming problem.
The glaring double negative of “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” led to the ruination of an entire generation---and continues to do so according to my 80 year-old neighbor.

A group from the 1970’s named “Bread”---made a lot of it by singing tunes riddled with egregious titles: “Baby, Ima Want You,” “It Don’t Matter to Me”---and a song called “Diary” where a guy sings, “I found a diary underneath a tree…and started reading about me.” Not only did he use ‘me’ instead of the more appropriate ‘myself’---but also Mr. Nosey was reading someone else’s diary, for crying out loud!

So it’s probably a good thing that Miss Lynn isn’t around today to see what’s happened to her beloved language---especially since emails and texting came along.

The combination of careless typing---and auto-correct---leads to perhaps a million flawed, misconstrued and unintended messages every day.
“Happy Birthday, my dear friend” becomes “Happy Birthday, my dead friend!”
“Hey, honey---pick up some Hunan beef” turns into “…pick up some human beef.”
“I’m a big fan of Trump” easily spell-checks into “I’m a big fan of Rump!”
My name ‘Pat’ almost always changes into ‘Pay’ when I phone text. The ‘man’ on my last name often gets left off too. Thus, my texts are often signed: “Pay Cash.” Hmm. That actually isn’t such a bad result.

Besides misspellings and faulty syntax, texting can get a person in trouble in other ways. Here’s a famous exchange from the Internet:
“What’s up, babe?”
“Not much. I’m just home reading. Going to turn in. What’s up with YOU?”
“Me? Oh, I’m in a nightclub standing right behind you.”
Oops. It’s suddenly become a lot harder to cheat thanks to technology.
But Miss Lynn wouldn’t have cared about any of that. It’s the lousy grammar that she would most rue.
She’d bemoan the pervasive mix-ups between ‘awhile’ and ‘a while’; ‘except’ and ‘accept’; ‘effect’ and ‘affect’; ‘your’ and ‘you’re’; and the big three: ‘they’re, their and there.’
She’d bristle at people who failed to close their parentheses. (Surely you know the type of people who often do such a thing.

And by the way, there is no doubt that she would have been furious if she’d heard Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”---which she would have immediately corrected to “Lie, Lady, Lie.”
Unless Dylan could have convinced her that the song was actually about a hen named Lady.

pat@patcashman.com
Pat can be seen on a brand new sketch show “Up Late NW” airing Saturdays on KING 5 and throughout the Pacific Northwest. He also co-hosts a weekly on-line talk show: www.Peculiarpodcast.com