The language police...

"I'm really gonna have to be careful around you," a newish friend remarked.
"Why?" I asked, while my mind raced like a hamster wheel. Was I widely known as a snitch? Did people think I worked undercover?
"Hear you're a writer, so I'll try to watch the way I talk," the friend explained. "I'm not that good with grammar. Just sayin'."

Zadie Smith, a great young writer, once told an interviewer that everyone in her neighborhood believed she was a whore. She said she understood why: she spent most of the day wearing nothing but a slip, got money in the mail, and men stopped by her house at odd hours. Somehow, this struck me as similar to my friend's assumption that I'd spot a participle dangling or an infinitive cracked in two. I guess we've both noticed how screwy people can be around writers.

I told my friend I didn't care a rat's ass about grammar. Just sayin'. But I'm not sure she ever believed me.

I like to eavesdrop though, because I'm always trying to get dialog right in my stories. It's really hard to convey the richness of spoken language. I also pay a lot of attention to everyday speech, because it's spoken language that eventually gets written down, then becomes standard usage, gets a bunch of rules baked around it, and is finally codified into something called "correct English".

It's this notion of a fully-fledged, correct and accepted English I wonder about. I'm always bewildered by outraged types who call the station whenever NPR has a "language expert" on: eager to expound on the non-difference between flammable and inflammable, and to tattle on slobs who overuse the passive voice.

Once I lost a contract because the guy reading my proposal said I made too many grammatical mistakes.
"And we can't have that," he told me, although he wouldn't tell me what the mistakes were, what constituted too many, or who we might be.
"Well, grammar is arguable," I said finally, which caused lots of snorting on his end of the line and then, bang, a hang-up .

But I was right too, by God. I'd spent too many years as an editor and English teacher not to know it. I still have in-my-head confrontations with this guy, in which I smash him like a bug. If he hadn't hung up, I'd have said that the various style books, like AP and Chicago, are fat with pages explaining just how arguable grammar can be. It's why most editors settle on something called common usage.

But I understand how deeply satisfying rules of any kind are. They allow us to be right, which is one of life's great joys and don't I know it. It's balm on the soul to believe that bright lines really exist in our arguable, shifting, and arbitrary universe.

And delighting in my own rightness is okay too, when I can remember my self-satisfaction is usually based on something as fictional as Mary Poppins.

Just sayin'.