This, to a Mac OS X user, seems strangely apposite. It appeared in The Monthly, June 2006.
Windows is Shutting Down
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.Clive James
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What an annoying poem! It seems to have been sparked by "Windows is shutting down", yet this is an old and venerable English tradition: Windows may be morphologically plural but it's semantically singular, the name of one thing: your computer's operationg system. Would Mr James have us say "War and Peace are a good novel"? There are a handful of accurate observations (they gets, all them rules, the pronunciation spelling of "must of"), but the rest of it is just randomly mispaired nouns and verbs and the occasionally determiner, most of which I'm willing to be he's never actually heard (let it goes? what am we? a languages? please).
Sorry ... but I hate it when people rant about language change without any knowledge of what language is or how it works. As Mark Liberman says, "I have DNA, so that qualifies me to lecture about genetics. Not."
And of course I fall victime to the law that says I must have made an error in my own post. Clearly, I meant "the occasional determiner."
Well it's also about the use of speelcheckers :-)