Are your ducks covered?

    

     I was in the office, working on next semester's curriculum, when I overheard a colleague on the phone: "I know," she said. "You have to have your ducks covered before you go into that meeting!"
     I couldn't help laughing to myself. Another colleague and I had remarked several times over the last year that correctly spoken English is a lost art. Those of us assigned the task of "teaching" grammar are the dinosaurs of rhetoric who, because we teach it on a daily basis, are all the more conscious of every error. Ugh! Crazy-making consciousness! (Anyone can all appreciate that wording even if it is grammatically unsound.)
     This post is for those of us who still wince at malapropisms, mixed metaphors, and dangling modifiers. Never mind subject-verb disagreement, pronoun antecedent agreement, and verb tense errors... and I am only talking about spoken English.
     All we can do is laugh along, right? Snickering with other English teachers may not be very mature behavior, but it makes us feel a little better.

    

       

Images from my student's world