Sesame Street, Special

💡 Did You Know?

There are unsourced claims that when 'Ralph Nader' was asked to perform the "Sesame Street" staple "The People in Your Neighborhood", he refused to sing the lyric "the people that you meet each day" because it is grammatically incorrect. He insisted on singing "the people whom you meet each day". The claims allege that the producers agreed to this change but convinced him to sing the original lyric on the set. However, listening to the clip Nader can clearly be heard to sing "whom" on his first duo performance - as in fact does the preceding singer Barbara Walters - but on the next two occasions, when he sings in quartet, all four singers appear to use the word 'that'. If not apocryphal, Mader's alleged insistence in changing the words of this known song out of concern for grammatical exactness, becomes ironical given the recording shows him seconds earlier stating "I'm making sure the wheels of this wagon were put on right". A more grammatically pedantic expression would not use the word 'right' as an adverb, but would rather have substituted the word 'correctly': "I'm making sure the wheels of this wagon were put on correctly".