Grammar Moses: Watt eye wood ent due four eh pullet surprise

As the managing editor of a newspaper I receive solicitations daily from people who want to sell me (and I presume multitudes of managing editors) something. Oftentimes they are products I have no use for or which would be similar to something we already have.

So I rarely get beyond the first two sentences before hitting the DELETE key.

On Tuesday, I received an email from someone — a vice president of an organization I will not name — pitching “quality content and investigative reporting at a price you can afford.”

Wow, I thought, investigative reporting doesn't come cheap. I'll read on.

Then came a list of clients, some with impressive credentials. And this:

“Our writers have won pullet surprises and Emmy awards and ... “ WHAAAAT?

PULLET SURPRISES?

Needless to say, I did not hit the DELETE key and decided I had a lead for my column.

I hope you have figured out the phonetic flub by now.

I wrote in one of my first columns a year ago about how I thought the 1967 Buckinghams hit “Kind of a Drag” was “Canada Dry.”

But, hey, I was a little kid, I had a jones for the refreshing taste of ginger ale, and the radio I listened to was a staticky piece of junk.

But how does one who is in the business of selling news content and is a corporate officer screw up “Pulitzer Prizes”?

I'm not the first to discover this goofy homophone.

Mark Eckman and Jerrold Zar, a biology professor at Northern Illinois University, in the 1990s cowrote (that's a story for another day) a poem titled “Candidate for a Pullet Surprise,” a cautionary tale on the growing reliance on spell check programs.

I highly recommend reading it at www.jir.com/pullet.html

Warner Bros. in 1997 made a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon called “Pullet Surprise” in which the titular smart-alecky rooster bests a henhouse-prowling puma. And the Wisconsin International Poultry Club for three decades has used the name for, you guessed it, an essay contest for children.

Topics include: Why I want to raise exhibition poultry; Raising poultry — it's a family affair; My most memorable moment in poultry; an original poultry poem, and poultry jokes.

Those crazy 4-Hers!

I'd steer clear of poultry poetry because of the potential for homophones and a twisted tongue.

YLOO!

Speaking of tongue twisters, imagine you are 18 years old (I'll give you a moment to try to find that frame of mind) and your bestie questions the wisdom of drinking a four-pack of Red Bull so you can stay up all night to study for finals.

“YLOO!” you might say, with a shrug. “You live only once!”

Wait, that's not the idiom.

“I just read your article online about putting the word ‘only' in its place,” wrote Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, resident Linda Howell. “There is a phrase that bothers me, but I am not sure if I am justified in disagreeing with it. ‘You only live once.' To me, that would mean that you alone live once. Is this grammatically correct? I think it would be more accurate to say, ‘You live only once.'”

Linda, I think you're onto something. However, to achieve the meaning you suggest, I would string it together like this: “Only you live once.”

It suggests that everyone else lives more than one life.

“You only live once,” the common idiom, could be interpreted to mean while you live just one life you do other things in multiples.

There are several ways to misinterpret YOLO, including that you could die more than once. Ian Fleming clearly considered that option when he penned his 11th James Bond novel, “You Only Live Twice.”

But YOLO is a well-established idiom.

Besides, you'd sound like a loon if you shouted “YLOO!”

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line.