I am not hypercritical on points of punctuation;
A misplaced comma now and then is surely not a sin;
I overlook the sundry breaks of common conversation
And do my wincing inwardly when some " I seen " creeps in.
To wretched double negatives some friends are quite addicted;
They knife the good King's English and then revel in its gore;
These crude idiosyncrasies are never contradicted,
For I would not seem pedantic or appear a learned bore.
Yet the whiskered proverbs tell us, and I know they tell us truly,
That forbearance as a virtue cannot always be construed,
And the camel's dorsal vertebrae, if weighted down unduly,
Will sustain a compound fracture with a fatal promptitude;
And when a college maiden, intellectual and charming,
Sends me a little perfumed note, regretful in its tone,
" To learn that all your symptoms are especially alarming,
And the doctor fears that the ' la grippe' has claimed you for its own ";
Then I howl and curse a little, and I stamp upon the letter,
And I boil with indignation to think that any one,
Who long has studied French, should not, apparently, know better
Than to write it " the la grippe," when but one " the " would have done.
A break like this affects me in a manner almost fatal,
'Tis even worse that the " la grippe "
Hevings! I have gone and done it myself!
