An email from my mother

I just needed to get this off my chest.

We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names and all are different colors. But they all have to learn to live in the same box.

This was at the bottom of someone’s email. It is bugging me. Crayons do not have to learn to live together in the same box. If they are my crayons, they will be scattered about. It should be:

We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names and all are different colors. But they all are crayons.

On the other hand, we can’t learn anything from crayons. They are notoriously poor communicators.