Photos of the test review question quickly went viral, with many Swift fans taking offense at the insinuation that their hero had used incorrect grammar.
Somebody is on Taylor Swift’s bad side. That’s not a huge surprise, given the fact that the pop singer/songwriter has had public feuds with everyone from Katy Perry to John Mayer to Spotify over the past few years. This time, though, her sights are set on the Ivy League.
According to a report from the Daily Mail, one of Swift’s lyrics was recently used by the Princeton Review, a board that creates test preparation materials for standardized tests such as the SAT, as an example of bad grammar. The line in question, “Somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe ’em,” was taken from the 2009 hit song, “Fifteen.”
The lyric was presented in a section of an SAT prep book, which proclaimed that “Pop lyrics are a great source of bad grammar,” and then encouraged test-takers to find the grammatical errors in lyrics from the likes of Swift, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Whitney Houston, and Swift’s nemesis, Katy Perry.
Photos of the test review question quickly went viral, with many Swift fans taking offense at the insinuation that their hero had used incorrect grammar. Swift herself, meanwhile, pointed out an amusing bit of irony in the situation: the lyrics were were.
That’s right: the Princeton Review had failed to fact-check the Taylor Swift lyrics they were mocking in their SAT test prep book. The actual line from “Fifteen” is “Somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.”
“Not the right lyrics at all pssshhhh,’ Swift fired back at the Princeton Review. “You had one job, test people. One job.”
Granted, the correct lyric is still grammatically incorrect, with the issue being improper pronoun usage. With the sentence subject “somebody,” the proper pronouns would be “he/she” and “him/her,” not “they.” Therefore, in the context of “Fifteen” (a song primarily about a freshman high school girl who falls for a senior football player, only to get her heart broken), the grammatically correct line would be “Somebody tells you he loves you, you’re gonna believe him.”
Still, the fact that a collective in charge of preparing high school students for college entrance exams couldn’t be bother to correctly quote a popular song lyric is priceless, to say the least.
The song “Fifteen” was culled from Swift’s 2008 album Fearless. That album was the pop-country singer’s breakthrough, selling 8.6 million copies and winning the 2010 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
