Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about a possible grammar error in the movie Wicked and what we mean when we say we're in somebody's neck of the woods.

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slash bonus. There's been a grammar controversy bubbling up from the new movie Wicked,

which is an adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, which was loosely based on the 1995

novel Wicked by Gregory McGuire, which was inspired by the 1939 movie,

The Wizard of Oz, which was based on the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

That's a lot of media properties.

So here's the deal. A listener named Brian wrote to me and said,

In several scenes in the movie, Elphaba corrects Glinda's grammar, yet she sings an entire song called The Wizard and I, which some are saying should actually be the wizard and me.

I've seen arguments for both ways, and I'm not sure which is correct. Well, first, it's

true that Elphaba corrects Glinda in the movie. I haven't seen it yet myself, but I asked my

followers on threads and have confirmed that Glinda says something like, wow, green goes good

with pink, and Elphaba says, it goes well with pink. And Glinda replies,

it really does, not realizing Elphaba was correcting her grammar. And after Glinda says she could care

less, Elphaba says, couldn't care less. So did the writers take our grammatically proper heroine and make her sing a grammatically

incorrect song?

Well, we have to look at the exact lyrics to figure it out.

Here are two times you'll hear the phrase, the wizard and I, in the song.

That's how we'll begin, the wizard and I.

That's how we begin, the wizard and I.

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