The Smurfs: Educationally Unsound

Here's a trailer for, God help us, The Smurfs, which comes out next year. You don't need to watch it to understand the contents of this post so I recommend not bothering.



I have two massive problems with this trailer, apart from the fact that it's not a sick joke. Firstly, this:

A rudimentary knowledge of the English language should encompass an understanding of the suffix "-ed", which is an inflectional suffix. It is so called because it inflects the root word to indicate the past tense. For example:

"I will kill whoever came up with this idea /

I have killed whoever came up with this idea."

If the root word ends with an "e", it is compulsory to only add the "d" of the suffix to indicate the past tense. For example:

"I hate whoever came up with this idea /

I hated whoever came up with this idea. So I killed them."

AT NO POINT is it acceptable to just add a "d" to a root word that does not end with an "e", nor is it in any way permissible to substitute the "e" with an apostrophe, the most abused punctuation mark in existence, unless the normal form of inflection looks odd; Wikipedia cites "KO'd" rather than "KOed" as an example.

My point, therefore, is that it should be "Smurfed" rather than "Smurf'd".

Secondly, the phrase "Next summer our world is about to get Smurf'd" makes little or no sense, even disregarding the tragedy already inflicted on the suffix. "Our world is about to get Smurf'd" would be better, or even "Next summer our world will get Smurf'd". However to include both "Next summer..." and "...about to get..." is a borderline tautology.

Also, that song playing at the end is abysmally shit.

To correct my inevitable errors, click here