Yesterday, as I watched some Beatles videos on YouTube, I read some of the comments that other viewers had made, and the sad, nay, disgraceful shape of our educational system was really evident. Across the board, the kids cannot spell, or even form a coherent sentence. "I should of..." is common enough, but I saw even worse examples. And I'm not talking textonics or lack of even intermediate language skills, I'm talking about gross misspellings of basic words that most of us learned by the third grade...One, however, made me really laugh. Here I was listening to John Lennon, who loved words and used them to say things in different ways. His first book, for instance, was titled, John Lennon, In His Own Write.
In the comments, a young man had tried to express how John's personality had been adversely affected by fame and drugs. I know that he was not attempting to emulate Lennon, due to all of the errors in his comment. In his last sentence he wrote how John's "sole had been laid to waist". I immediately saw an image in my head that was something like the this picture. I couldn't even congratulate the kid because he would have had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't even know that he'd committed a great Lennonism.
