Filed by: Officer Taylor
In the late 70s and early 80s, The Jam were one of the most widely admired British post-punk bands, and with good reason. Their lead singer and main songwriter, Paul Weller, had a knack of coming up with catchy, infectious hits.
Their finest album is generally agreed to have been 1978's All Mod Cons, which contains an atrocious ballad called English Rose:
No matter where I roam
I will return to my English rose
For no bonds can ever tempt me from she
No matter where I go
I will come back to my English rose
For nothing can ever tempt me from she
It gives us no pleasure to admit this, but in the interests of full disclosure we feel we must mention that when Paul Weller was at school in Woking, his music teacher was our friend Rachel's mother. So she must share some of the burden of guilt for this atrocity.
We won't insult your intelligence by explaining what's wrong here.
Or no - wait - we will explain, in the hope that one day Paul Weller will visit this site, and so understand What He Hath Wrought. Maybe it's not too late for repentance.
The problem here is that the third-person, singular, female object of a sentence is ``her'', not ``she''. Just as the first-person, singular object is ``me'' rather than ``I''. So Weller should of course have written:
For nothing can ever tempt me from her.
As any half-competent seven-year-old could have told him. We can only be glad that, lacking the courage of his convictions, Weller stopped short of writing:
For nothing can ever tempt I from she.
Putting an end to Weller himself would be a start, so without further ado we sentence him to an unnecessarily unpleasant death. However, that measure alone does not address the roots of the problem, which - it pains us to admit - must surely go back to Woking's educational system. In a case like this, it is better to be safe than sorry; so excuse us if we seem harsh, but we feel we have no alternative but to sentence Woking to be carpet-bombed out of existence. And Guildford to be taken out, too - partly because it's dangerously close to Woking, but also because it's just not very nice.