Last week something unusual happened: “Weird Al” Yankovic, the 54-year-old parody singer, captured Billboard’s number one slot with the release of a new album, Mandatory Fun. It’s hard to overstate how weird (sorry) this is. Yankovic’s first hits came in the 1980s with send-ups like “Eat It” (instead of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”). It was great, and Weird Al kept at it, creating a niche for himself in the music biz over the next 30 years. Which is remarkable in its own right, much less in the genre of ephemeral comedy. Only a handful of singers have charted on Billboard’s Top 40 in four straight decades: Among them are Michael Jackson, Madonna, and .  .  . Weird Al.

The improbable hit single on Weird Al’s improbable hit album is “Word Crimes,” a parody of Robin Thicke’s global megahit “Blurred Lines.” Instead of being a sub rosa celebration of the hook-up culture, Weird Al’s song lampoons the grammar and spelling oddities of millennial Twitter culture, taking aim at some prevalent abuses of the English language. For instance: