these elves or those cheez-its?

In the spirit of pursuing excellence and serving the nations to the best of our ability, may we suggest a slight alteration in a commonly misused phrase that has made its way into IHOP jargon? Now before we go any further, we do want to say our heart posture as puppets is not to criticize the content or heart behind any of the prayers that we hear day and night…night and day. Rather, we want to encourage each other to excel still more and more in all wisdom and understanding of grammatical execution.

Many of you may be interested to know that we actually met while pursuing our doctorates at Duke University. Stil graduated Summa Cum Laude in Speech Pathology and Nordic Dialects and Linguistics. Stumpy graduated Magna Cum Laude in Medieval Literature and Phoenician Hieroglyphic Translation. It wasn’t until we met in Elvish 401: Tolkien Unbound that we discovered our mutual love for human fremsprachen. Or, for the lay person, languages. So as you can see, we know what we’re talking about.

Now, onto correcting 87% of IHOP. We love you…but using the terms these ones or those ones is grammatically incorrect. It’s redundant and both words are not needed. The proper terminology is simply these or those. IE – “Set these apart.” OR – “Strengthen those with might in the inner man.” OR, even still – “Open the heavens over the weak.” (Different word but the same rule still applies.)

In conclusion, we hope this correction is encouraging and beneficial to the house as a whole. We would also like to add that clearly our love is not measured by grammatical correctedness. If you have read our blog at all, you are aware of our abiding relationship with Cheez-Its. Clearly, whoever named this scrumptious product did not know how to spell “cheese.”

So, as they say in elvish…dea ladeilaven aui.