Everyone knows pop music is filled with grammatical errors. But The Princeton Review’s SAT prep book has been found to have made an error of its own! The test prep giant misquoted one of Taylor Swift’s songs, “Fifteen,” while attempting to make an example of Swift’s bad grammar.
“Somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe ’em,” the test prep book quotes Swift as singing. As soon as she noticed this glaring error, Swift swiftly posted to Tumblr, saying, “Not the right lyrics at all. You had one job, test people. One job.”
Check out the error for yourself!
To be fair to Swift, even in the misquoted lyric above, her grammar isn’t nearly as bad as Timbaland’s. When The Princeton Review got word of its error, though, they diplomatically tweeted an apology to Swift.
Ironically enough, the actual lyrics are still far from grammatically correct. “Somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them” contains a comma splice, is missing the word “when,” and contains the colloquial “gonna.”
We love the idea of having students correct musicians’ grammar! Even our best bards are guilty. It’s “Lie, Lady, Lie,” Bob Dylan…