Sometimes, when I sing along to the radio or the iPod or other music-playing gadget, I will come across a song featuring incorrect grammar.

And I want to punch the singer.

I am all for poetic license and I understand about dialects and functional conversation grammar and whathaveyou. That’s fine. It adds flavor. It adds voice. It’s like writing in a dialect, an excellent example being Their Eyes Were Watching God by Nora Zealle Hurston (which I actually hated and it annoyed the everliving out of me when I was reading it, but I recognize its literary merit and that had it been written in Standard English it would not be the same).

It’s instances  that are very obviously mistakes that make me want to go kickboxing. Places where the writer, singer, producer and whoever else was involved clearly did not catch the error. Or worse, did not realize the error was an error!

Cut out my heart, why don’t you?

An example, “When you find the place that your heart belongs, you’ll never leave.”

NO!

A place is not a thing. It is a place. Therefore it is not a that. It has its very own pronoun. Where. USE IT SPEAKERS OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE!!!!!

So whenever that song pops up on my iPod I sing, “When you find  the place WHERE your heart belongs, you’ll never leave.”

And yes I do emphasize the “where,” ensuring that  I don’t even hear the mistake.