1. I was hired in the fall of 1977 to teach a college writing class at Whitworth and I taught my last such class in the spring of 2014. For a variety of reasons, I didn't teach every year between 1977 and 2014, but in the course of those years, I taught a lot of writing classes.
Those writing classes focused on reading essays and books, demonstrating an understanding of that reading, composing essays, and learning principles of grammar and usage.
In other words, I spent much of my adult life correcting the mechanics of my students' writing and trying to help my students learn how to recognize errors and correct them themselves.
I never quite pushed that boulder to the top of the hill.
I bring this up because on fairly rare occasions, someone on a Facebook or other kind of thread will take it upon himself or herself to correct other people's language errors.
Today, one person pointed out to at least a couple of people that when they wrote "I seen" such and such, the correct way to write that is "I saw".
Okay.
The corrector was right.
But to those who say to me, "once a teacher, always a teacher", I respond, "Not me".
I feel no compusion to correct the many errors I read in other people's writing and I have no desire to be corrected myself.
I know I make mistakes and I think I make more as I grow older.
But I do notice the errors and, I admit, they often make me cringe, but in the larger picture, I'm not as interested in correctness/incorrectness as I am in observing the general use of English change.
Please note I did not say "deteriorating" or "getting worse". I said "change".
I note repeated changes and have come to believe that some of the things we used to insist upon as correct, are simply going away.
Here are a few examples:
I saw vrs I seen. So many people, whether in their spoken or written use of English have cast "I saw" aside and replaced it with "I seen" that I think "I seen" might take over and become an accepted past tense of "I see".
I rarely hear or read anyone use "lie" and "lay" correctly. When I do hear someone use these verbs correctly, I hear the Oregon Duck fight song go off in my head and enjoy this triumph.
But, I think this distinction is very close to DOA, especially because not only do I see and hear people in my day to day life say "lay" when it should "lie", but some of my favorite published writers also make the same error.
Likewise, I think we can stick a fork in the difference between "every day" and "everyday".
This is not a spoken error but a written one and the error is always the same.
Again and again and again, when a sign or advertisement or Facebook post or whatever should write "every day", I see "everyday".
I guess you could say that I simultaneously cringe and shrug.
I like to read and hear these our language used correctly.
At the same time, I tell myself that a person using "lie" correctly instead of "lay" incorrectly isn't going to bring peace to the Middle East or help Avista get people's power back on.
I pay attention.
I keep track of how our use of language changes.
I'm happy I retired from needing to be a correctatron.
I should add, though, that I have friends who want to preserve what has long been considered correct English and I love our conversations, and I greatly admire those who have a passion for preservation.
Those of you reading this know who you are and PLEASE keep sending me memes and jokes and your own observations/gripes about the world of speaking and writing English. Thank you!
2. I try, and often do it without trying, to learn something new every day (two words -- not everyday! Ha!).
Today, I learned I have something in common with Joseph Stalin.
Today, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 walloped me with its beauty, range of emotion, and (I think) occasional whimsy.
I also learned that Joseph Stalin loved this concerto of Mozart's and that, in fact, it was spinning on his record player when he died in his bed.
I very much enjoy reading about and talking with others about how we are all connected. In fact, I expressed this one day at a hot dog stand. When the hot dog griller asked me what I wanted, I said, "One with everything."
Until today, though, I'd never thought of Joseph Stalin as a soulmate, a brother, of being joined with each other in our love of this Mozart piano concerto.
I learned about Stalin from a story Colleen Wheelahan told on one of her radio programs today and then listened as she played the concerto, clicked on my Spotify app, and played it a couple more times.
Suddenly television ads for Salem cigarettes occupied my mind.
I experience parts of Mozart's concerto to be romantic and I had visions of different young men and women running and frolicking in nature, maybe a forest, then a field, then, oh my God!, I began to picture scenes from advertisements for Salem cigarettes.
Many of Salem's ads worked to create a connection between the freshness of smoking a Salem and the freshness of the country. You might remember the jingle: "You can take Salem out of the country, but, you can't take the country out of Salem."
So here I was, sitting in the living room, sharing a chair with Gibbs, trying to deal with discovering Joseph Stalin ain't heavy, he's my brother and then having visions of a perfect looking couple having found a swing attached to a tree in pastoral setting, the man pushing the woman, and that romantic scene being portrayed as if it were connected to the way "Salem refreshes naturally".
3. I took a break from thinking about lie and lay and Stalin dying to the beauty of Mozart and the menthol freshness of Salem cigarettes and popped myself a bowl of popcorn and wondered whether Gibbs also makes surprising and absurd associations and connections that unnerve and delight him. Or does he just want me to toss more kernels of popcorn on the floor for him to eat?
