Songfacts®:

• Weird Al sidesteps the furor of misogyny accusations that surrounded Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" and spins the song into "Word Crimes," a parody that simultaneously educates and skewers the grammatically challenged with a red pen:
  
  If you can’t write in the proper way
  if you don’t know how to conjugate
  maybe you flunked that class
  and maybe now you find that people mock you online
• "There were already about 10,000 parodies of ["Blurred Lines"] and they were all rapey," Al told The View. "And I thought nobody had done a song about grammar."
• Al incorporates a sly jab to pal Alanis Morissette in the music video when a wedding day downpour accompanies the lyrics "irony is not coincidence" - a direct hit to Morissette's song "Ironic," which incorrectly uses the example "It's like rain on your wedding day."
• Al told Lily Hirsch, author of Weird Al: Seriously, that the comical rant was inspired by a perpetual issue with the grammar-challenged folks at his record label, who would send him press releases for approval that were riddled with errors. "Well, spell my name right first," he laughed. "And this is written by professional people. It's their job to do these releases. And still, they were doing typos, syntax errors. I mean, I would have to go through like I'm an English teacher and, say, red-line it."
• Al inadvertently committed his own word crime with the lyrical insult, "'Cause you write like a spastic." The term "spastic" has very different meanings depending on where you're from, a fact he learned the hard way.
  
  "Now, in North America, that just means basically a goofy idiot," he told Lily Hirsch. "Outside
  of North America, particularly Australia and the UK, it’s specifically referring to somebody with cerebral palsy. And it's considered a horrible slur. It's like the R-word. And when people in the UK heard that song, they were very offended, and I was horrified."
  
  He added, "I apologized profusely, and I think I'm largely forgiven because people realize that there's a language difference."
• This is a two-for-one parody: Not only is Al taking aim at people who assault the English language, but he's also mocking the grammar Nazis who judge offenders too harshly. "A lot of my songs are two-edged in that way," he told Vulture in 2014.