Grease is not the word, not the word, not the word.
Some years ago, Sesame Street, the PBS educational kids show, decided to stage a musical. The theatrical extravaganza of choice was the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic Oklahoma! The morning I watched was O what a beautiful morning. The corn was as high
68 (Which is what the word AAAQOWJIFLQWIUZZZJRHA means: “It’s just not fair.”)
69 1 once won a Scrabble tournament by using my 8,ooo-point tiles for the Old English letters thorn and eth. The officials quickly recognized my counterfeiting, but nonetheless awarded me first place for my ingenuity, and of course all that is a lie.
70 Interestingly, jishwife has been used pejoratively more often than pig-wife, though this footnote is in no way seeking to balance things by pointing out the possibilities.
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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as a Muppet elephant’s eye, the music rose to crescendo, and the Sesame Street cast began to sing the title song: O ... !
And it pretty much ended there, because Sesame Street was brought to you that day by the letter O. Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter K the next day, I on Wednesday, and .. . well, it took several weeks to complete the title song.
Thus I learned in this absolutely fabricated story 7 how to spell Oklahoma! OK! (And there’s a reason why the musical was not set in Mississippi.)
I’ve learned many other things grammatical and orthographical from American musicals. For instance, how to pronounce potato (long A) vs. potahto (short A), in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” a George and Ira Gershwin song from a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical, Shall We Dance. (The song goes on to detail other variant pronunciations, like neether/nyther, vanilla/vanella, and pajamas/p’jahmas.) Critical information.
But, I contend mischievously and with avowed silliness, that despite hit Broadway runs, Hollywood musicals, and Broadway revivals, one of the musicals has been lying to us: Grease is not the word, the word, the word. “It’s got groove, it’s got meaning,” goes the lyric. Since I don’t know what the lyricist means by groove, I fail to grasp the meaning. Unless . . .
Unless we turn to other languages. (How’s that for a transition?) Kate Burridge in Blooming English discusses one danger of using foreign words and phrases, especially in speech. She calls this danger “hyper-foreignization” and uses the French coup de grace (“blow of mercy”) as an example. Most of us English types (guilty as charged) would pronounce this as “coo-day-gra,” while the final
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Bill Brohaugh
syllable should actually be pronounced “gras.” Burridge writes, “if you say ‘gra’ not ‘gras’ then you’re actually pronouncing the French word for grease—so the blow of mercy becomes the blow of grease.” And not the groove of grease?
What’s more, when turning to other languages and understanding that so much of our vocabulary and vocabulary-building tools (such as prefixes and suffixes) comes from the classical languages, we clearly see that Greece, and not Grease, is the word, is the word, is the word.