Philip Martin Simms, I loathe thee.

My inexplicable hatred of Phil Simms has been brewing for years now. It's not that I disliked Simms as a New York football Giant. It's that I can't stand his voice. I can't stand his broadcasting. And I absolutely can't stand the way he says "him."

As an English teacher, small subtleties like this do tend to bother me, but usually I can let things like this go. People frequently, and annoyingly, mispronounce everyday words and phrases, like "for all intensive purposes," "I could care less" (then why don't you?), and the unnecessary phantom "t" ended to the end of "across." For the record, whenever I question people about that "t," they deny it, but I know they said "acrosst" the first time. The "t" -- it was there.

I know my hatred for Simms is rooted in the vein of senselessness.  The guy was a quarterback, and actually kind of a good one, and definitely did not go to school for English, speech, broadcasting, or communications. (FYI, that's a gross assumption, because a simple Google search would not yield an answer to what he studied at Moorhead State. Probably a major in "how to annoy linguists.") Throughout the course of a game, he annoys me perpetually with different inaccuracies in his speech patterns, generally sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know, it sounds like he's choking on his own throat when speaking but without the entertaining Austrian accent), but none of this eclipses the atrocity by which he pronounces the simple pronoun "him."  "Heem."  "Heem, Heem, HEEEEEM."  If there was an actual award for "Person Who Most Accurately and Consistently Substitutes the Short 'i' Sound For Long 'e,'" Phil Simms would be undisputed 12-time recipient.

Google was very telling, however, in why Phil Simms speaks in the manner that he does.  The dude's from northwest Kentucky, which, combined with the corner of southeast Indiana, takes the cake for, in my opinion, the most god-awful annoying accent and linguistic patterns known to man. I dated a girl (read: psycho) from Indiana once, so yeah, I'm kind of an expert. In this sad region of the world, people LOVE (yeah, that's caps and italics) NASCAR (or Indy Car, or Sports Motor racing, or funny-car, gas-wasting, hit-the-pedal and steer left driving, or whatever they want to call it), White Castle, firearms, and Merle Haggard. They also love to say "warsh" (as in, "I've got to warsh the clothes, then warsh some dishes, then warsh my car, and then take it out to the Indy Speedway, hit the gas pedal, and steer left), and neglect the entire concept of the "to be" verb form.  For example, something doesn't need to be washed, it just "needs warshed."  Something doesn't need to be heated in the oven, it "needs heated." Don't confuse this with any progressive tense forms, where it'd be perfectly acceptable to say that something "needs heating." No. Past tense all day, "needs warshed." I call this sort of speech "Kentuckianian."  But I digress.

Phil Simms really can't help the fact that he was raised in the third-world region of America. But I still can't stand the way he talks.