With his new hit video Word Crimes, “Weird Al” is doing a great service for American education.

In particular, he’s attacking the non-teaching of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and everything else. He's got people talking about these important issues.

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He does not mention the slinky sophistry that progressive educators have used for 75 years to justify this non-teaching.

 When you study a primitive tribe, you should DESCRIBE what they say and do. You should not PRESCRIBE. Of course. So what.  But our progressive loons declared that we needed to take this sensible protocol from the jungle back to New York City. Why did they say that? Because they wanted to push the inanity that we should no longer pay attention to editors, teachers, English professors, journalists, and authors. We should pay attention only to what is spoken in the streets, where anything goes, and that’s what we should accept in the schools. Isn't that a clever way to dumb down K-12 education?

Here’s my review of the "Weird Al" video; it has a link to the video and to a longer discussion of the prescriptive vs. descriptive sophistry.

http://www.examiner.com/review/word-crimes-weird-al-rescues-grammar...

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