I'm well aware that pop musicians have a long history of mangling English grammar ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction") and spelling (The Beatles, The Monkees), but Fergie, the lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas and sometimes solo artist(!), has committed so many crimes against my mother tongue that I have to, as the kids say, call her out.First, there is "My Humps." This is a song that, like all of Fergie's oeuvre, consists of Fergie rhapsodizing about her own hotness. In it, she refers to her breasts and/or her butt as "my humps" and "my lovely lady lumps." I appreciate the rhyme and the alliteration, but when I think of humps I think of Quasimodo and when I think of breasts and lumps I think of cancer—and no, Artist Formerly Known as Stacy Ferguson, I don't want to touch your cancer, thanks.
That's just a case of awkward word choice, but the title of Fergie's new album is downright dumb. It's called the The Dutchess. That's right, The Dutchess. I get that she was trying to play off the fact that she's called Fergie—like that red-haired English chick—but isn't there someone in her entourage or at her label who could tell her that "dutchess" is NOT A FREAKIN' WORD? But it gets worse. In her latest single "Fergalicious," which is, shockingly, about how all the boys want to have intercourse with Fergie, she refers to herself as delicious, which she spells out correctly, and also "tasty," which she spells, and I quote, "T to the A to the S T E Y." If you're scoring at home, that spells "tastey," which, like "dutchess," is almost, but not quite, an actual English word. But who knows? Maybe Fergie isn't really to blame. After all, she works closely with the gramatically mangled will.i.am. And she's so busy that she sometimes has no time for basic personal hygiene.
So rather than mock, I hereby offer my services to Fergie and any other singer/songwriter/multiplatform performer. Add me to your entourage at a reasonable rate, and I promise from the bottom of my pedantic heart that the tastey dutchess will reign no more.
