Family story time: my family is full of academically minded people (three of my grandparents worked as Latin teachers), with varying levels of snobbery and reasonableness. One of the first times my dad went to my maternal grandparents house for dinner, someone said “margarine,” pronouncing it with a hard g. My father asked why, and my grandfather explained that there’s no soft g followed by an a in English.

My father accepted this, and looking to change the subject, asked if my grandparents could offer any help analyzing “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”