Prepositions and AY's

Prepositional phrases are evil and so are AY’s. You might be wondering, "why?" Well, ask any kid why about the prepositional phases, but some kids, all right every kid but I and my sister Missy, will be stumped on the issue of AY’s.

I suppose this story really starts back in third grade or so when I started learning about prepositions. For years I learned to cross them out. ALL of them, every time. So, when I started writing books (yes, I do write books at thirteen. That was NOT a typo), I always wrote them and wanted them, prepositions, to die as they had in my English. In case you didn’t know, you have to have prepositions to write a book. So, mates, why do they teach us this in the first place? I won’t tell you because I don’t know. This also means I don’t want a whole lecture on this subject. I don’t know because I don’t really care.

AY’s on the other hand are a whole new topic. It started when Missy and I were going over my book for things that needed changing. We both like to do this because it is fun to laugh over the funny parts and read the sword fights and so on and so forth. At some point in this process Missy gets up and walks off and in the middle of a page! Me, thinking this quite rude, asked, “What are you doing?”

“Asking mother something,” she replied. I was even more insulted than ever. Not because I don’t love mother and her advice is useful but the least she could have done was ask me first. “Mom, can OK’s be O-K or do they have to be O-K-A-Y.”

“It has to be O-K-A-Y,” she said.

Missy came back and I said, “Fine. Watch this.” I went to the top of the page and pushed the EDIT button. Then I went down to REPLACE and typed the two in. Confidently I pushed the REPLACE ALL. We resumed reading until, to my stunned surprise, we came to the word "looked", which now read, "lookayed". Since there is a O-K in the word the computer helpfully added a AY to it. It had done this through the entire book. I glared at Missy, who was laughing hysterically, and said, “This is your fault.” For the next hour or so we went through it and took out AY’s. By the end of this long, breathless process the two of us had laughed to the point of bursting. From now on, neither of us will ever look at a "looked" the same again and AY’s are never again going to regain their place as normal letters.

So, I conclude with, Prepositional phrases are evil and so are AY’s.