POETIC TRUANCY

My English Teacher Was a Word Whacker

Who fantasized about a threesome with Funk and Wagnalls

I used to cut English class because of a teacher I disliked. She mangled my sentences, made us turn over every Grammarly rock — read and reread it, eliminated all the errors until nothing was left but a blank page.

She locked us in an air-tight room, removed all of our comma splices, the unnecessary ellipsis, the missing comma in a compound sentence, a redundant indefinite article, and the punctuation mark that missed the mark.

“There are rules, rules, rules,” she said. “Never use the same word twice. Don’t use too many adverbs, and if really or very or always pops up, you better cross them the hell out!”

She had two red markers in her double barrel holster, an eraser dangling from her neck, and wheeled around a dolly with a king-size Merriam-Webster.

She promised that my poems would sound better if words like this or that, somewhat, actually, or extremely were obliterated from my verse.

She took pleasure in breaking three words into one, and didn’t think twice before removing my favorite stanza or line, and then made me rewrite the poem until it lost its meaning, and impossible to find.

She was a literary weed whacker, a woman wielding an electric word clipper who tased me for using clichés and needless phrases that didn’t make sense anyway.

But in her private life, she never wrote a damn thing — instead, she was a woman of passion, a sex-starved Flaubert floozy who made love with William Strunk Junior and had a threesome with Funk and Wagnalls.

“Whenever you correct someone’s grammar, just remember that nobody likes you.” — Jim McGaffigan

© 2023 Mark Tulin

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