Here's my fantasy: 

I'm a teacher with a class full of pop- and rock-star students. It's the end of the term, and I can finally give them the grades they deserve for butchering the mother tongue in the name of the Top 40.

It's only fair. After all, we're held hostage to the sweet, paralyzing drone of radio broadcasts and televised music videos. While the entertainers get rich, their bad rhymes, vapid lyrics, and outright inexcusable grammar assault our eardrums and get stuck in our heads like so many wads of gum under the study hall desk.

It's a wonder we haven't all been brainwashed into saying "baby" instead of "um" when we're pausing mid-sentence. And it's not just the pop musicians of today. This has been going on for generations--at least since Elvis claimed to be "all shook up." (It's shaken, Elvis, not shook. More on that later.)

And so it is high time we take back the language from the pierced, unusually long, and occasionally ululating tongues that have twisted it. The way to do this, of course, is to give them grades. After all, what could be more frightening to a celebrity than getting an "F" from an encyclopedia-site columnist?

Exactly. To find out which of your favorite entertainers is among my worst lingual offenders, baby, read on.