Number 12
Parvum Opus is a day early, as you will have noticed (don't you love that tense?). I'm out of town, which alters my schedule and facilities. If this issue seems to ramble, it's because I am rambling.
The reader who had difficulty receiving formatted text also has problems with the unformatted text, which I know can display strange characters as it goes from word processor to my e-mail to others’ e-mail. So I’m returning to the original method of sending formatted text in the body of the e-mail, without a different attached version. Let me know if you have problems, though I don’t know if I can solve them. The newsletters are accessible at www.keithops.us.
A reader writes:
"My parents used to get a lot of their entertainment from the folly of the the rest of the English-speaking world. My father was especially fond of the sub-Thompson machine gun, invented by sub-Thompson. I still have his two-volume Fowler somewhere, I think in the attic. They were very firm with me about exposing this family pastime to my friends. Not only was I told never to correct anyone's grammar away from the family table, I was advised to avoid using the correct construction in the hearing of the dolt who had misused or mispronounced whatever it was in the first place."
I would like to have been part of her family. This is a level of gentility and kindness equivalent to those of the person who drank out of the fingerbowl when an innocent guest, not knowing what a fingerbowl was for, did so. Of course, it wouldn’t work so well in matters more serious than those of grammar and table manners ~ murdering in order to spare the feelings of the naive murderer, for instance ~ but we’ve been warned early and often against the dangers of finding motes in others’ eyes ("Well, I admit I’ve thought of murder...").
People are insecure about their use of English in a way that they are not about their inability to do calculus, say, or paint or run marathons. Most of us don’t berate ourselves or others for not playing basketball like Michael Jordan, yet I think people who’ve done poorly in English classes carry away suffering that they don’t from other subjects. As a teacher I often heard the anguished cry, "I hate English!" or "That was my worst class!" Friends and family, even the most articulate, will apologize for their spelling or grammar when they write to me, not because I’m more knowledgeable or articulate or correct, but because...I don't know, it's so personal.
I don’t apologize for not being able to play the guitar or speak ten languages or run a mile. I’d like to be able to do those things and maybe I could if I’d applied myself, while there are other things I would never be able to do. Yet when it comes to English, we speak the same language, after all. It’s our common tongue, our mother tongue. But...
These things must be handled delicately, as the Wicked Witch of the West said.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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