I Am The Very Model of an Amateur Grammarian

Tom Freeman of The Stroppy Editor took the Major-General's Song from the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan and adapted it to suit the modern swashbuckling world of grammar nazism:

I am the very model of an amateur grammarian
I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian
But I make no apology for being doctrinarian
We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian

I’d sooner break my heart in two than sunder an infinitive
And I’d disown my closest family within a minute if
They dared to place a preposition at a sentence terminus
Or sully the Queen’s English with neologisms verminous

I know that ‘soon’ and not ‘right now’ is the true sense of ‘presently’
I’m happy to correct you and I do it oh so pleasantly
I’m not a grammar Nazi; I’m just a linguistic Aryan
I am the very model of an amateur grammarian

Somebody needs to make a YouTube clip! Read the rest (to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's masterpiece, of course) over at Tom's blog: Link - via Metafilter