I forgot to do a blog today and just got home from dinner with a writer/editor friend of mine (if you haven't had the food at Neighborhood downtown, go).

She was telling me dirty phrases and songs from her childhood, and I was shocked I had never heard any of them. The only one I remembered was the famous "If you're walkin' down the street and you feel that heat..."

One of her songs went "milk, milk, lemonade..." and it gets X-rated from there.

I brought up an instance where we heard the Afroman song "Because I Got High" for the first time. We loved it.

At the end he utters a bunch of weird things; one of which was "a,e,i,o,u...and sometimes w."

I had mentioned that it should be "...and sometimes y." But where she grew up in the mid-west, she said the teachers taught it as "...and sometimes w and y."

Why? I have no clue. I don't know of any instance where a "w" is used for a vowel.

At the time, I thought she had the phrase wrong. We called everyone in our cell phones (which, if you haven't tried it, is a really great way to settle debates and garner opinions).

About 90% of the people we called were on my side. But the 10% that had heard the phrase, was enough for me to realize there really was a phrase like that.

All this reminded me of a story I read a few weeks ago. It was out of London and it said that the "i before e, except after c" phrase could no longer be taught in schools.

The British government told teachers not to pass that rule to students, because there were too many exceptions.

The document was called "Support For Spelling," and was sent to thousands of primary schools. Some of the examples they used that make it confusing are the words "sufficient,' 'veil' and 'their."

No teachers were told to stop letting kids on the playground sing the diarrhea song.