Poem in Your Pocket Day

For Poem In Your Pocket Day, here is my selection:

A Warning To My Readers:

Do not think me gentle 
because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace 
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I 
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

--Wendell Berry

It's not too late for you to grab a poem, print it, and put it in your pocket. Then it's ready for you to pull out during the day and read to a friend or to a stranger on the train.

What poem did you put in your pocket today?

Hashtag FFWgr

Ninety-nine percent of you won't know what that title means--which is sort of the epitome of bad communication. Nonetheless, I'm starting there, because I ended there--at #FFWgr. 

#FFWgr, the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a biannual conference of writers and readers of faith: about finding faith, leaving faith, and returning to faith; about the connection between faith and writing. I make my pilgrimage there to find inspiration and motivation. I'm completely positive (in the ironic sense of those words) that I will eventually be one of the speakers there, talking to the little people about getting up at four a.m. and sitting down in front of the computer and waiting for God to show up.

Actually--that was James McBride's line. My perspective will be more of a p.m. perspective, because mornings give me hives; and my topic will be Why I Keep Writing Even Though I've Never Been Published; And As A Matter of Fact, Why Would You Even Listen To Me?

I'm going to give you two kinds of #FFWgr candy: motivational and/or interesting quotes from some of the talks I went to; and a reading list. I kept notes as I listened, and wrote down the names of books and authors that the speakers mentioned. I may have missed a few, but I've still got a pretty good list.

So first, the quotes, in order of their appearance:

Daniel Taylor:

"Everyone should write their own apologetics--how do you tell this story of faith to yourself?" This is a riff, he said, on Milton's idea that everyone should write his own theology. I tried to confirm that Milton actually said or wrote something like this, but could not. Internet, could you do me a solid and let me know a) did Milton ever say/write anything like that and b) what's the source?

The topic of Taylor's talk was The Use of Story in Apologetics. He said, "stories defend faith by making it desirable, powerful, winsome. Stories don't just tell truth. Truth can be a sledgehammer. Stories can make faith not just reasonable and believable, but also attractive."

"Stories are convincing; they require us to change, and tell us how to do it."

"Stories don't prove anything, but stories prove everything that's important."

"Don't just tell anecdotes, tell stories. Anecdotes are reduced; they lack personal experience and emotion." I'd like to learn more about this distinction.

"Look for evidence of the divine in the mundane and even in the profane." 

John Suk talked about something called "perspective by incongruity," an idea of Kenneth Burke's which I didn't quite get but will add to my growing list of Things I Want to Know More About.

(Sigh. #FFWgr always leaves me with the existential exhaustion of realizing ever more clearly how much I don't know.)

From James McBride: 

"Most of what I do fails. Learn to fail. Fail--then forget it." I'm not sure I believe this. Maybe it's hyperbole? I would like to know, operationally, what that looks like.

"I wake up at 4 a.m. and just sit there waiting for God to come into the room." Many speakers at the conference mentioned the productivity of the early morning hours, which discourages me a tiny bit.

"Skepticism is good, but cynicism is a killer of dreams." Ooooh, this was good. (And by the way, how do you spell "ooo" that rhymes with "mood" rather than ooooh that rhymes with "road"? Because I was aiming for the oo in mood sound there, but it just didn't look right without the h.)

Shannon Huffman Polson: 

"Grief and loss are lonely, but they connect you to humanity." I think this is why suffering is such a useful tool for an artist, writer, musician. Dammit.

"I wanted to suffer, wanted the pain of grief--because it would keep me closer to those I had lost." This certainly resonated with me, even though I remember when I said it to a friend, she looked at me strangely. I saw other heads nodding--and I was glad to see that this counter-intuitive feeling of wanting to hold on to the pain of grief was not merely a glitch in my otherwise well-adjusted persona, but that it had universal resonance.

"If the grief ebbed, did it mean that the love and connection were not that great? There is a lot of guilt in grief." This, too; both the question and the statement.

Andrew Krivak:

"Take small acts--actions outside of the interior life of grief and loss--and write them into your story." This is actually a paraphrase, but I like the notion that small acts have great value. I think he was making a reference to the book Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World. 

Peter Marty

Peter Marty (whose appearance reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer):

"If you want to be a better writer, become a deeper person." I wish he had offered Seven Steps to Becoming a Deeper Person.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We keep on outsourcing our brains--we know and remember less. We externalize our knowledge, our taste, our experience, and our faith. We reference and rely on the faith and experience of others. In Genesis, by chapter three they stop talking with God and start talking about God."

"Is it possible for some people to miss their lives in the way that they miss a plane?"

"Tell me what you love, and I can tell you what you believe." Oof.

"We identify our center through suffering." More on this, please.

Anne Lamott:

"Life and writing are very, very hard. I don't think we're here to figure things out."

"There is perfect healing, but people die anyway. Frankly, if I were God, I would have a completely different system."

"I think if there is a God, he probably looks a lot like Isaac Stern. Or Bette Midler."

"We were taught to stay one step ahead of the abyss. If the abyss opens up at your feet, go to Ikea. Get an area rug."

"It's OK to admit that you're crazy and damaged. All the better people are."

Hugh Cook offered practical advice about writing fiction:

"Your character must desperately want something; but something thwarts her. She must make specific, decisive actions."

"Use dialogue not for narration or description, but to show your characters."

"Reveal your character's age early on."

Brett Lott:

Start a story with what you know, and head into "what if"--what if this happened, or that?"

Suzanne Woods Fisher:

"Answer the call to write; keep the calling at the forefront of your vision all the time."

"Living for the opinions of others is seductive; don't do it. Remember who you are."

I have no quotes from James Vanden Bosch, but his presentation on corpus linguistics was one of my top three sessions. Who knew. I might even sign up for the eight-week MOOC in September.

Miroslav Volf:

"Atheists point to ways that religion and Christians have failed and malfunctioned."

"We must listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from around the world to penetrate our own self-deception. We must listen to the wisdom of saints and critics."

"We are restless for God; we reach for the transcendent. The orientation of our selves to the Divine is the primary function of faith."

This next quote is from an audience member who might have been quoting someone else, but it struck me as worthy of inclusion: "Christianity has become so sentimental and shallow that we can't even produce good atheists anymore!" This was connected to the part of the interview in which Volf said something to the effect that he'd take Nietzsche over Dawkins any day.

"I don't bemoan the marginalization of the Christian faith. There are strengths in the margins. When Christians were in the center of power we were used, and the faith was abused. Like the band of twelve followers on the outskirts of Jerusalem, we can testify to the beauty of Jesus Christ from the margins."

Rachel Held Evans:

"Every challenge--the challenge of writer's block, distraction, discouragement, fear, lack of ideas--is solved by getting back to work. In writing, that work is paying attention, naming things, telling stories." 

"Remember that God is generous, and grace is scandalous. God has called us to this work. There is no scarcity principle at work in writing--there's plenty of work to do, plenty of stories to tell."

Now, I bet you can't wait until #FFWgr2016! I know I can't.

Stay tuned for Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: Reading List.

Thirteen

Hello InterWebs,

M. Peevie here. I took a year off from guest blogging my annual birthday post on The Green Room. I was working on my post last year, didn't quite get it done, and then my brother Aidan died. As Mim has said, we lost our whimsy--and since these posts are generally chock-full of whimsy, I just could not hit "publish."

(Mim, or Mimsey, is one of my nicknames for my mom. C. Peevie came up with it. I am also fond of calling her by her first name, and I get a small rush of pleasure when her friends overhear this and make a shocked and horrified face. Mim doesn't mind, she said, as long as it doesn't feel like disrespect to her. I guess so far it doesn't.)

Me, Aidan and C. Peevie, December 2011

So. Aidan. Yeah. It's really hard to talk about that. I love to talk about Aidan, and I miss him all the time. Sometimes I wish my friends would talk to me more about him, and ask me about him. The part I don't want to talk about is how I feel about him dying or about how much I miss him, because I don't really have words for it, and I don't know how talking about it is going to make it any better. So I just sort of go along missing him, and remembering him, and telling Aidan stories when I get a chance.

So much has changed in my life since my last post when I turned 11. I am nearly thirteen now, and I am a different person.

I left my little school where I had lots of friends, and teachers who love worksheets and who sometimes seemed to love rules more than children, and went to a big school, Whitney Young. I went from having two brothers at home to no brothers at home because C. Peevie left for college in August. I went from being a pre-teen who likes big words like "anthropomorphism" to an actual teenager who still likes big words like "precipitously" and "petrichor" and "sesquipedalian." 

I went from getting straight As in school without breaking a sweat to getting almost straight As but definitely breaking a sweat. When I was 10, I wanted to go to DePaul on a softball scholarship. When I was 11, I wanted to go to MIT to study architecture and engineering. And now I have determined that it makes more sense to get a liberal arts education first, so I want to go to DePauw University, and then maybe MIT, or maybe somewhere else, depending on where the liberal arts take me.

My school is great. I have new friends (Hi MK! Hi BB! Hi Beckham!). I like that my classes help me understand important topics in our country like the Affordable Care Act, the debt ceiling, and the government shut-down. I made advanced honors band, which keeps me awake at night with anxiety. I have to keep up with kids who are in high school and who have A LOT more experience than I do. 

I am riding the school bus for the first time (boo) with other seventh and eighth graders who are loud and obnoxious and immature and annoying and stupid. They make me envy deaf people. I also take CTA now (yay), and have my own Ventra card.

It might interest you to know, InterWebs, that I have become a Fangirl. Fangirls are girls (duh) who are fans (duh) of certain TV shows, movies, and actors--but we are more than fans. We are obsessed. My particular areas of obsession include Doctor Who, Sherlock (the BBC version), Supernatural, and the Marvel Universe. I'm pretty sure that Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, and David Tennant all love me as much as I love them, which is a lot.

Oh, and I am now a card-carrying Nerdfighter--one who is not ashamed to be intelligent, and who fights to decrease WorldSuck. Nerdfighters are entirely composed of awesome. I highly recommend that you check out the books of the Nerdfighter in Chief, John Green, and in particular, The Fault in our Stars, which I have read multiple times.

That is about enough for now. This is M. Peevie, signing off.

Sticks and Stones

Recently Stephen Colbert (I think, or maybe it was Jon Stewart) made the politically incorrect statement that we need the word "retarded." We can't let stupid, self-serving politicians and linguistically hyper-sensitive word-nazis take our most useful adjectives away from us. It just wouldn't be right.

Across the spectrum, actor John C. McGinley, spokesperson for the National Down Syndrome Society said on Huffington Post that using the words "retard" and "retarded" is offensive, hurtful and demeaning to members of the special needs community. It "belittles people with special needs," he believes.

McGinley suggests that the way we know that "retard" is an "instrument of hurt" is that it is never used as a compliment. He neglected to point out that this is also true of the colorful epithets "stupid," "dickwad," "ass-hat," or "crusty batch of nature"--but that doesn't mean there isn't a time and a place to use those words.

He compares the R-word, as he calls it, to nigger, kike and faggot. He says that the second way we know that we shouldn't use it is by asking

would the circumstances allow for substituting the N-word instead? Could the R-word just as easily be replaced by any number of pejorative slurs that would serve the same purpose? The answer to both these hypotheticals is; not in a million years!

This argument contains a logical fallacy: it presumes the conclusion, that "retard" is a pejorative slur in the same way that "nigger" is a pejorative slur. It's not, in the same way that the word "cripple" is not necessarily a pejorative slur. It can be used that way; but its use does not automatically presume aspersion against paraplegics. The word "nigger" is always, by definition and common usage, a slur against black people. The word "retard," on the other hand, has been in common use to mean a person, thing, or behavior that is backward, laughable, stupid, nonsensical or indefensible.

I submit that using the word "retard" about someone who is not mentally challenged but who is merely speaking or behaving in a stupid way, who is willfully ignorant, only disparages the insultee. The meaning and scope of the word should be judged by its context and intent.

About a year ago Jon Stewart used the word "retard" on his show, and a parent of a mentally disabled child wrote in to complain about it. She was articulate and civil; and her comment sparked a discussion that went on for 71 pages, over the course of a month. Another correspondent on the message board, also parenting a mentally disabled child, wrote, "Words are just words: you can choose to be offended, and you can choose to not be offended."

Who's right?

No one except school-age bullies uses the word "retarded" to disparage people with mental disabilities--not even Rush Limbaugh. It's unnecessary and a little bit retarded for Mr. McGinley and others to campaign to have the word excised from our collective vocabulary. It's ridiculous and exploitative for Sarah Palin to call for Rahm Emmanuel's resignation because he used the word--especially when she defends Limbaugh using it in exactly the same way.

The Green Room Bottom Line: some words offend some people; and we should choose our words, and especially our insults, carefully.

Discuss.

Twitter, Twitter, Tweet.

Do any Green Room readers Twitter?

I do. But I don't really know why.

Why would anyone care what I have to say in 140 characters or less? Who cares if I am trying to decide what kind of bread I will make with my KitchenAid stand mixer? Or what I think about John Hamm from Mad Men hosting Saturday Night Live? Or whether I don't really care to watch grown-ups sledding, no matter how fast they're going?

Twitter seems like a useful and fun tool if you already have a following, or if you have a business to promote. But what if you're just a fame-whore like me? It's just a silly vanity.

But you know me by now. I'm totally on board with silly vanity. I have five--no, six now!-- followers on Twitter. Six people ostensibly care about my minutest random thoughts. My most recent tweets were about Dick Button's shoes (that make him look like a Rescue Hero), the implicit irony of trash-talking in men's figure skating, and Jason Mraz night on American Idol.

Doesn't that make you want to set up a Twitter account and start to follow me right away?

My friend K-Squared, a brilliant entrepreneur and social media maven, gave me a copy of Twitterature, which brought me literally minutes of entertainment and hilarity. The authors rewrote literary classics (and some definitely-not-classics, like Twilight and The Da Vinci Code) "for the twenty-first-century intellect," in 20 tweets or fewer. It's not for young kids, because there is colorful language; but it is sort of brilliant.

Here's a sample, from Paradise Lost, by John Milton:

FALLING UNTO THE ABYSS!!!!! I'll talk more about why in several hundred pages to avoid any confusion.

OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.

'Tis Pandemonium down here. Would ROFL but it's very hot.

I'm bored. I'm the chairman of the board. My compatriots are r-tards. Inaction? Is that the best we can do? We are fucking demons!

Sitting on our asses waiting for an apology from G-d isn't exactly renegade. Pussies.

OK, that's enough for now. Pick it up at the bookstore, read it while you're on the El, and then hand it to someone as you leave the train. You'll make her day. Or offend her, if she's profanity-sensitive.

Follow me on Twitter @EPeevie!

Get Ready for Poem in your Pocket Day

Go here to enrich your life with poems and poetry-related ideas and activities.

Start thinking about what poem you'll put in your pocket for Poem in your Pocket Day on April 30. Will it be a classic that reminds you of your 8th grade English teacher? Or a sentimental favorite that you first read when your love was young?

Maybe the poem you put in your pocket will be a brand-new find, something that makes you think, hmmm, I should seek out poetry more often. Or maybe it will be a Psalm, or other poetic verses from the Bible, which of course is packed with poetry and all sorts of other literary forms.

I'll help my kids choose a poem to put in their pockets on PIYP day. It'll probably be something by Shel Silverstein, a perennial favorite among all Peevies, not just the short ones. (FYI, if you only click on one link in this post, click on the Shel Silverstein one, because it's fun.) Maybe this one, called Messy Room:

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

You are going to think I am terribly predictable and lame when you hear what poem I chose to put in my pocket on PIYP day. Too bad. I came across it by accident while cruising around on poets.org, and at first I was going to choose this one instead, because when I read it I thought, wow, this woman is my psychic twin! Only smarter and more literary.

But then I clicked to read about the author, Elizabeth Alexander, and I was reminded that she read a poem at Obama's inauguration--and I remembered liking it when I heard it; so that's my poem in my pocket: Praise Song for the Day. Here it is:

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.


Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

I would love to hear your PIYP selection.

Freelance Woes

I'm looking for freelance writing jobs, scouring the Internets, visiting job boards, and generally bemoaning the economic conditions that have put me into a state of virtual unemployment as an independent writer for nearly eight months. Where is my stimulus package?

I've even submitted a love poem to a greeting card company. Now that's desperate, because I am the least sentimental person you will ever meet. Wanna know how bad it gets? Here's the first line:

Our souls touched long before our eyes met.

HA!

But hey, I've read the drivel on greeting cards in the drug store, and someone's making money on it. It might as well be me. I can write sappy love messages with the best of them.

Another way I could make some money--if I didn't have a conscience--is by writing college essays, book reports, and term papers. I would like to hear from you--anonymously, of course--if you ever paid someone to write a paper for you in college. Did you have any qualms about it? Did you get a good grade? Does it bother your conscience today? Would you want your own child to pay for a term paper? How do you justify it--or don't you bother?

Ironically, the companies looking for writers of term papers have strict guidelines about plagiarism -- and some offer their clients free plagiarism reports along with their research paper. It's a whole industry based upon cheating! Incredible.

One company is looking for a gullible fool to write articles for $3 per article--plus a bonus dollar for real good quality. Another one offered two cents per word. A 300 - 400 word original article, including research, would take a minimum of 2-3 hours. That means these writers will earn anywhere from $1 - $3 per hour. Who is willing to work for these kinds of slave wages? Are they freaking serious?

And yet, these jobs have dozens of bidders. One writer, a former newspaper reporter, is willing to write 30 five-hundred-word articles for $30. I...I...I'm speechless. I made more money 30 years ago when I was cleaning houses during the summer.

And finally, a former client just offered to "hire" me to work on a grant proposal with him--but he can't pay me unless he actually gets the grant. Seriously. Not only does fundraising on a contingency or commission basis violate the ethics of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, but he is essentially asking me to be willing to work for FREE, with only the possibility of a paycheck sometime in the future.

If I'm going to work for free, I'm going to blog--and someday, my blog and I will RULE THE WORLD.

So there.

Six Word Memoirs

Have you heard of Smith? It's is an online storytelling community. I can tell it's going to be a huge time-sink. Excellent.

Smith offers writers and storytellers a place to, well, write and tell stories.

For one exercise, Smith assigns writers to compose their memoir in six words. Six words! This idea germinated from the legend that Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story using only six words. He wrote, "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

Some of the six-word memoirs on Smith are funny, even hilarious:

"Slightly psychotic, in a good way."

"Six sisters. So you can imagine."

"God, I am such an idiot."

Others take your breath away with horror or sadness:

"I found my mother's suicide note."

"I'd never heard of autism before."

"Womb betrayed me, stilled my baby."

And many of them make you want to know the rest of the story, like this one: "One time, an emu bit me."

Here are my own six-word memoirs, so far:

After depression, sun is out. Grateful.

Three kids; time not my own.

Not six words; just one: Love.

If I’m not, no one is.

Grateful: Jesus, Kevin, kids, friends; life.

Bad mom says wait for commercial.

Jesus loves me; this I know.

Irreverently loving God; imperfectly loving you.

If I didn't laugh, I'd cry.

Please forgive me. I was wrong.

So much television, so little time.

This is a fun way to spend six minutes or six hours. Try it--I'd love to hear your six-word memoir.

(Hat tip to Zzilda for pointing me to this way cool website.)

What do Shakespeare and Obama Have in Common?

You'll be excited to learn, as I was, that next week we'll be celebrating National Grammar Day. In honor of this august holiday, I'd like to share a grammar story with you.

"A. Peevie," I said, "don't eat any more of this bacon. The rest is for me and M. Peevie."

"M. Peevie and I," said A. Peevie, wearing his Captain Grammar cape. I gave him a Look.

"What?" he said, with a sly grin. "I'm teaching you English."

The keenly observant among you will immediately note that technically, in terms of standard English grammar, my original construction was correct and A. Peevie's correction was wrong. The phrase "me and M. Peevie" constituted the object of the preposition "for." You wouldn't say "the rest is for I."

But more important, where is he getting the idea that clear, understandable spoken language requires correction? Not from me, I assure you. In fact, he gets quite the opposite from me. We take non-standard grammar and syntax examples and fondly turn them into family slogans, like "What did you said?"

I suspect the nefarious influence of a prescriptive English teacher at school has inculcated the noxious notion that correcting someone's grammar is acceptable and appropriate. I love excellent and precise written and spoken language as much or more as the next guy--but I'm not on board with untrained and unrestrained grammar policing.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) is the primary sponsor of National Grammar Day. The society's blog (yes, the SPOGG Blog) comments on celebrity grammar goofs, with recent bi-partisan criticism for both President Bush and Senator Obama; and the blog even nags celebs to use "proper English" in text messages and blogs.

Obama got nailed for using a "they" with a singular antecedent--the same construction that Shakespeare used more than once ("There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/As if I were their well-acquainted friend," in A Comedy of Errors). If it's good enough for Shakespeare, and if it occurs "in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries" according to Language Log's Geoffrey Pullum, then why isn't it good enough for Grumpy Martha (SPOGG's prescriptive host) and the rest of the grouchy prescriptivists?

My favorite linguists over at Language Log Plaza mildly ridiculed National Grammar Day as potentially mean-spirited--but they did not resort to name-calling, as Grumpy Martha said they did in her reply. I'm in the linguist's camp on this one. I don't think we need more finger-pointing about language, especially when the operational definitions of "correct" and "proper" grammar are dynamic.

And we definitely don't need more correcting and finger-pointing from 10-year-old ill-informed language tyrants.

Yes We Can

I loved this video. You can say it's all fluff and no actual stuff, no meat, no substance.

But words are powerful, and emotions are powerful, and this little video is powerful. It uses only the words of Barack Obama in his New Hampshire speech.

I dare you to watch it and not be moved--even if you're not voting for him, or don't like his stance on abortion, or whatever.

I get goosebumps every time.

Freshman Composition 101: Redux

Hi. My name is E. Peevie, and I'm a (recovering) prescriptivist. I come from a long line of unapologetic linguistic prescriptivists. Just a few weeks ago my mom commented on the incorrect usage by a television personality of who versus whom. I suggested that according to common usage by native speakers, the distinction was no longer valid.

"So," said my tiny, white-haired momma with a tinge of hostility and possibly even a mote of self-righteous indignation, "Just because everybody does it, that makes it right?"

"Well, um, yes," I said, "in language it does."

"Hmph," said momma.

I know what she was thinking, and what she would have said if the conversation had continued. She would have asserted that of course common usage doesn't change the rules. She might have even compared it to moral relativism: Just because everybody now thinks __________(fill in the blank) is OK doesn't make it right.

I wonder what she'd think of this post in Language Log about the use of the "singular they" to refer to the next president of the United States. Geoffrey Pullum points out that this usage has occurred for the first time because this is "the first moment in history when there is a genuinely non-trivial amount of doubt about whether the next president will be male or female."

Actually, I know what she'd say. She'd be horrified, and insist that the correct pronoun would be the gender-neutral "he," or she'd grudgingly suggest that even the more politically correct "he or she" would be a more correct choice.

When I was an English major back in the dark ages, my grumpy department head, Dr. William Pixton, was a standard-bearer for standard English. His very own "Some Conventions of Standard Written English" was the required text for the composition classes I taught as a graduate teaching assistant. I made freshmen cry with my red pen bleeding all over their lame essays, filled with p-antes and p-agrees and s/v/a's. I drilled it into their thick Okie skulls that pronouns must have clear antecedents, and the antecedents must agree in number with the pronouns.

(I even edited my little brother's papers with the same hard-line approach, and to this day that high-achieving yet tender-hearted big-shot trembles at the mere mention of a p-ante. This post is dedicated to him.)

But I've switched teams. I believe, like GKP, that the singular "they" is here to stay. And I'm starting not to mind so much.

More importantly, isn't it brilliant how relevant and interesting grammar and linguistics are? I'll bet you had no idea.