big cook little cook - a grammatical deconstruction

[midnightexpress]

Right pedants, ds1 (2.10),in between being a meerkat and asking his father 'daddy, what's a credit crunch?' this evening came out with the following, which he claims is a line in the tidying-up song on BCLC (I was obviously mning cooking dinner at the time):

blah blah blah blah blah blah
make it sparkle and clean

Now I don't like that, but I'm not sure why (and I grant you that he may have got it wrong and it might be 'make it sparkly and clean'. But if it isn't, it works grammatically, but it's just not right.

Is it just because 'sparkle' is a verb and 'clean' is an adjective here?

Or is it because 'clean' could be a verb too, and you expect another verb, so you're waiting to find out the object of the verb?

Or what?

I am sorry to say I spent the DCs' entire bath-time pondering this conundrum.

Wash, wipe,scrub and clean
Make the kitchen sparkle and gleam

Gleam. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Well, he is under 3, so I guess it's fair enough.

But I'd be quite interested if anyone knows the answer, even though they don't say it.

BTW, Word, I hope you don't know all the words.

How could I not?! We have the DVD, so I must have heard it umpty-two times over the years

I dare say I probably know most of the actions too

OMG there's a DVD??? How frightful!

I had better keep that one quiet. Whenever (and it's not v often) there is a lull in the conversation round here, ds1 is prone to burst into cbeebies-related song.

It's all "Green Balloon Club" songs round our gaff.

"Tho' we are yah we all realah the little things we do...."

Doesn't matter how often I point out what the words actually are. She still likes to sing them in the strangled inarticulate style of her hero, Lily-Rose.

Bah!

Bless.

It's all good clean fun. Cbeebies makes my life tolerable. I will not hear a pedantic word against it.