Going through a rough spell

I just looked it up: it will cost $40,920 to attend world-famous* Georgetown University in world-famous Washington, DC, in the coming academic year.  (I also noticed that the late fee is $100, so be sure to enroll on time, to save that extra C-note.)

That's just eighty dollars short of costing 41 thousand semolians to attend this august academy, home to noted scholars such as Bill Clinton, Savannah Guthrie and Patrick Ewing.  It's a fine school, so one can appreciate how the parents of this year's graduating class felt last weekend when they showed up for the commencement exercises and saw the program (at left).


That's right, Mom and Dad! Thanks a million for spending over a hundred thousand to send me to Georgetown Univeristy! 


Seems to me, if you are putting on a graduation hoopla and you send the program down to Lou at the print shop, someone or several someones ought to check the thing over, am I wrong?  


And not just with spell check, because every won nose ewe ken make miss steaks that spell Czech jest Will naught ketch.  Fact is, spell check can be a real pain in the asp, because it doesn't reason as we do when we write.  It knows there is a word "everyday" and it doesn't care if we use it wrongly (as in, "I use spell check everyday") because we forget that it's an adjective, not an adverb.  So, use spell check every day, but be sure to have a lot of peephole check your stuff!


If I seem like a stickler about this, it's because I kind of am! Our lovely English language, spoken and written by Shakespeare, Keats and Kerouac, is being torn apart by the uncaring and unwilling.  I say, let's all take more classes at leading univeristies or something.

* I threw that "world-famous" in, because the voiceover on the Oprah Winfrey Saying Goodbye After 25 Years Gala Farewell made a huge point of saying that it was taking place in the "world-famous United Center" in Chicago, Illinois.  To put that to the test, why don't we call a Maori bushman in world-famous New Zealand and ask if he has ever heard of the United Center?  Any subway rider in Tokyo?  A Swedish accountant? A guy who rents catamarans on Eleuthera, the Bahamas?   It's a basketball arena in a big city in the American midwest, not Mecca, for crying out loud.   Is this place near where Ferris Bueller danced on the parade float?