Congratulations to young Andrew Thompson, the adorable Smyrna kid who just landed the Oscar Mayer spokesmodel gig. Andrew made the national talk-show circuit last week and treated America to his version of the 1963 Oscar Mayer Weiner jingle. When he cuts loose, he’s one-third Ethel Merman honking out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” one-third Gary Morris doing the s-l-o-o-o-w version of “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” and one-third air-raid siren.
You gotta love Andrew, but I’ve got a problem with the PR weasels who decided to dumb down the lyrics to the jingle. They’ve got Andrew singing, “I wish I was an Oscar Mayer Wiener.” Now, everybody knows that the Oscar Mayer jingle is meant to be sung in the subjunctive: “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener.” This is a by-God basic of cultural literacy, and I say you don’t mess with it.
I called local grammar doctor Phillip Sparks and ran this by him. He told me that when a person is talking (or caterwauling) about something indefinite, it’s more highbrow to use the subjunctive “were.” But nowadays, he says, most experts say it’s OK to say, “I wish I was.”
I argued that if this were a highbrow thing—see how much better that sounds?—I wouldn’t even be aware of the problem. In fact, I’m pretty darn sure I learned about the subjunctive from the Oscar Mayer jingle.
As if this weren’t enough—there it is again—I almost missed my stop at the Krispy Kreme one evening when I saw the new sign on what used to be West Side Hospital. There, in great, big lighted-up letters, it said: “The Women’ Hospital.”
The Women’ Hospital? I’m telling you, it’s time to pack up and head for New Zealand. Here we’ve got Columbia, a health-care giant, in the brain surgery business, unable to rectify a simple apostrophe problem.
I felt a little—but not a lot—better the next day, when I checked out the sign in the daylight. It turns out they’ve got an “s” up there after the apostrophe. The foul-up is in the lights, not in the grammar. But still, shouldn’t Columbia, a resourceful outfit by any definition, be capable of fixing this problem before people start noticing?
Stuff like this fouls up the intellectual growth of little kids. Ever since the “It” burned out in the Sbarro sign at Bellevue mall, daughter Jess thinks Sbarro is an “alian eatery.” She refuses to go in there now; she wants Chick Fil-A instead.
These are examples of the process that preservation types call “Broken Window Syndrome.” It works like this: An abandoned building will stay in pretty good shape until the first window gets broken. Before long, somebody notices and figures it’s OK to break another window. When two windows are broken, it’s clear nobody cares, so all the windows get broken. Eventually, the building burns down, and the blight spreads until it reaches a neighborhood where the people will fix the windows as fast as the vandals can break them.
Let things slide just a little, and the repercussions can be huge. For instance, I neglected one little section of leaf-clogged gutter on the back of my house. I figured I’d have it cleaned out in November, after all the leaves had fallen. The only problem is, it started overflowing and dumping water into the house in September. Now I’ve got to patch and repaint a soggy wall—a $50 job expanded into a $500 job.
I’ve seen houses where one overflowing gutter caused a whole foundation wall to fail. A job that one guy could have done with a trowel and a bucket mushroomed into a job that required a backhoe, a bunch of stonemasons, and a truckload of scaffolding.
So I say that Oscar Mayer needs to get busy and gently introduce young Andrew Thompson to the subjunctive now, before the Super Bowl commercials are in production. If that boy can learn to sing with English-ambulance vibrato—which is not a natural thing for a child—he can learn to change “was” to “were.” Columbia needs to get its “s” lit up, and Sbarro needs to get its “It” together. They should all take a lesson from Disneyland. In the Magic Kingdom, they know when each light bulb will burn out, and they change ’em out before they’re due.
Visit Walter Jowers’ Web site at http://www.nashscene.com/~housesense
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