fussbudgets

Well I don't know nothing about no GFI, don't care to know nothing neither.  When the towers were built in the early sixties they were pretty innovative.  The main innovation being that they are all electric, and then there were other innovations some of which never caught  on so we have some peculiarities.

Wires, you know, one wire is a simple thing, and two not much worse, but if you get any more wires things become exponentially complicated.  Oh you can go back and trace every wire and get them all straightened out, and sit back like little John Horner and think what a good boy your are, but by the time you have pulled out that plum the recently tamed wires will resume their tangled nature.  Nothing to be done about it.

But I am a firm believer in breaking down a big problem into its constituent little problems and solving them one by one and then putting them all together.  That was one of the first things they taught us in computer school, when you are writing a program break it up into those little boxes, like in a flow chart.  Seems like flow charts had a big vogue twenty, thirty years ago, but you don't see them much anymore,  My theory of what happened is that the fussbudgets got a hold of them.  If everybody is using flowcharts they reasoned, well we ought to do them right, so then they made up a whole bunch of rules to make sure it was done right, and once you get to making up rules why it's hard to stop yourself, and eventually it got to be such a pain in the ass that people stopped using them, or at any rate, showing them to anybody.

That is certainly the way it is with grammar.  People have been using language for, at least 60,000 years says the google machine.  I reckon at the beginning it was pretty loose, all we were interested in was figuring out what the guy on the next rock said, but once we invented agriculture and got culture why then certain ways of speaking became preferable to other ways of speaking.  Mainly the ways of the rich and the powerful became the proper way, while the ways of the guys sweeping out the barns became uncouth.

Like for instance ain't (for instance itself is a bit uncouth, but see sometimes you can use an uncouth term to imply a certain intimacy, a certain tell it like it is attitude, but I do go on).  For some reason back in our grade school days this innocuous contraction (am not) was singled out as the exemplar of uncouth talk.  I don't know why, and I'm not (ain't) gonna bother to look it up at this point.

I'm guessing I used it when I was quite young,  You know there is that lore of young kids, figures of speech, schoolyard games, that they pick up from other kids and by the time they outgrow them they have already passed them on to other kids, so that the lore remains unchanged for generations.  Like for instance when we were playing It, the tree or the fencepost you could cling to and be immune to tags was called gule.  I expect this was some kind of corruption of goal, but it was not something I concerned myself with at that age.

Anyway somewhere along the line I stopped using ain't, except for effect, and I don't  know anybody who uses it regularly.  Except there is this one woman in my improv group who says it all the time.  She's maybe ten years older than me, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I don't know.  I would love to ask her about it, but I'm afraid she might  think I was insulting her, calling her uncouth as it were.

Just a couple more days now Gentleman and the yearly recaps will be over and we shall be standing alone and unafraid, but maybe a little chilly staring out across the vast snowfield that is January and February and much of March.  See you then.