Lugubrious

A TV critic has described Kanye West's apology to Taylor Swift on the new Jay Leno Show Monday as being lugubrious. (The first show was quite funny, by the way - welcome back, Jay.)

So let's learn a new word for many of us:

Lugubrious - mournful, dismal, or gloomy, especially to an exaggerated or ludicrous degree

I'll also make use of this entry to spotlight how much so many of us have strayed in our use of proper grammar, a trend I believe will grow exponentially by all the Twittering and texting going on (to say nothing about the spelling of words).

The biggest culprit is the inaccurate use of "I" versus "me" in sentences. So many of us reflexively say things like "It's important to him and I" when it's supposed to be "It's important to him and me".

It's actually easy to remember - whenever there's an "and" in the sentence, just break the sentence up into 2 sentences - "It's important to him" and "It's important to I"? - of course not, "It's important to me" - and then put the "and" back in there.

There are so many people in this world who pay money to learn English (the English education business is huge); many foreigners overseas know English (grammar & vocabulary) better than lots of Americans.

Winners keep up with their vocabulary, spelling, and grammar.