Sat, 17 Nov 2007: achy breaky grammar
Category: Linguistics
by: Wes Groleau
To THAT tune:
"No rotas más mi pobre corazón"
I'm sure that’s what I heard on the radio. But then my inner prescriptivist reared up and began arguing, "No, it can’t be!" And my descriptivist countered, "If it’s never heard, how come I recognized the meaning instantly?"
So I googled it and found it’s on YouTube half-a-dozen times (oh, exCUSE me, half of a dozen), all with "rompas." Unfortunately, most if not all of the words are unintelligible in all of them. (And the video is generally just as bad.)
If your kids like Cyrus, perhaps you could offer them a literal translation (how would you translate "achy breaky"?), and then ask them if they think this one is better.