the language guys

Well written Beagles, and look at that, a full colon in the very first line. I use the colon sometimes, though I am generally aware that I am being show-offy, and a little self conscious, because I am not a hundred percent on the rules for one. I suspect a comma would be just as effective, and a little quicker because you don’t have to pause to consider the grammatical complications. But, I have to add, it looks pretty cool, and it has an authorative, almost military, buzz about it. Not so the semi colon. I believe I experimented with it in my youth, but now that I am mature, I have eschewed it completely.

I like that little girl, sometimes the tykes, unburdened, as we are by all the junk we accumulate as we walk the dusty road of life, see right through us. I expect she would have had Socrates scratching his chin and saying, “Well, I uh...” Maybe a day after mankind invented rules, he began thinking of ways to get around them, did I say a day, I meant five minutes.

Ah that elusive common sense. Common sense would tell you that common sense is the way to go. But it is often wrong. The sun does not go around the earth, the light from a train speeding north travels just as fast as the light from a flashlight held by a man standing beside the track and facing north. See, I can see that little girl piping up, “But what if the train and the man were facing south?”

I remember in my teaching days, a kid would ask me why is two and two four, and I could pick four pennies out of my pocket and separate them into two groups of two and count them, and there I was absolute proof, but if the kid asked me why it was geese instead of gooses, I could only shrug, that’s just the way it is.

I don’t think the rules of grammar were based on common sense, I think they were formed by a committee, actually several committees, making rules and then competing with each other and winning some battles and losing some battles, maybe like the church at the dawn of the dark ages and one faction finally wining out. Take that rule about prepositions, who made such a rule? Who sez? I don’t remember if we were taught that rule in school or not.

And your point is exactly correct, these rules are debated by clusters of dusty professors in ivory towers that nobody really pays attention to. When they notice that nobody is following that rule anymore, they declare that that rule is invalid. Actually there are several of these committees and they decide different things at different times.

How about those newspaper articles when a dictionary comes out with this year’s new edition and tosses some words and embraces some new ones? Nobody remembers the words being dropped, which is the reason they are dropped, but there is generally a bit of ado as people debate which new words get to go in. I miss the language columnists, like Safire, seems like there once were several of them and now there are none. Maybe we could do that, instead of Car Talk, we could be the Language Guys. We’ve already had one comment, our popularity is soaring.