Monday, December 11, 2006

"WHERE IS THE FISHES?" Shudder



Making my way through the building that houses my gym, I found myself a few paces behind a young mother and her adorable, blonde-haired toddler. It was a precious scene: she pushed his empty stroller as she looked over her shoulder and encouraged him to stop dawdling. He was clearly in awe of the hordes leaving work at the time. As we came upon a restaurant with a large fish tank built into its wall, the mother saw her opportunity:

"Where is the fishes?" she asked him. "Can you see the fishes? Fishes, fishes!"

I nearly fainted.

Sure the toddler was practically running in the direction of the "fishes" and his mom by this time but that's beside the point. How dare this woman expose her impressionable child to such glaring grammatical errors??! And why, in the name of all that's good, didn't she have even the most elementary grasp of what, by all appearances, was her native tongue? Am I unfairly assuming that blonde hairs and blue eyes equate American? If this is the case, I apologize most profusely. Her accent, however, would prove otherwise...

I can't help but react passionately to such blatant abuses of the language.

6 comments:

Chris said...

Maybe she was saying "fishies" with an accent of some sort?

Besides, fish are cool. They have such a calming effect, that they may have impaired her speech patterns.

Anonymous said...

Well, technically if it was tank full of various kinds of fish- the child's grammar was correct. You can correctly use "fishes" when referring to different species of fish. Using is instead of are, however, is totally unforgivable...

Anonymous said...

The plural form regardless of the presence of distinct species is "fish" and not "fishes"!!!

Terra Shield said...

Totally irrelevant, but the sentence you wrote reminds me of gollum saying "my precioussss..."

Why? Oh Why?

Shafaat Khan said...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fishes)


fish (fĭsh)
n. pl. fish or fish·es

Her grammar was correct according to dictionary.com. As far as her using "is" rather then "are" is concerned, suck it up, mind your own business and stop listening to other people's conversations.

SabilaK said...

Wow. My own brother...