What ho! Happy January 5! We have made it through the first few days and so far have kept our New Year’s resolutions—one of the most fun things about the calendar’s rolling over.
So far, my easiest resolution to keep is by far the oddest, but I promise it will bring you calm and mindfulness. Are you ready?
AVOID READING ARTICLES THAT IRRITATE YOU!
You don’t have to read everything. Really, you don’t. If you suspect something will annoy you, skip it. If you are an expert on a subject, you needn’t bother to seethe over the opinions of every counter-expert. Often it’s the most trivial details that ruffle feathers.
And so I stare beadily at the headlines, hoping for a psychic flash on whether an article will prove enlightening or irritating.
Take books about grammar. I enjoy a brisk debate about whether the nominative absolute is dead. I love understanding relative pronouns and explaining the difference between “who” and “whom.” I have given many people copies of Strunk and White, Dreyer’s English Grammar, Patricia O’Connor’s Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing, and similar books
But do I need to read every new book on grammar? No, but it is time to reread Strunk and White. (It’s been too long.) New books on grammar can take only two directions: they either uphold the traditions , such as the proper form of relative pronouns and the use of the subjunctive, or they insist that all such grammatical forms are antiquated and should be outlawed.
Recently The New York Times published a review of David Shariatmadari’s new book, Don’t Believe a Word. It may be a very good book, but I daren’t read the review. The subhead says, “David Shariatmadari’s book delves into issues like grammar snobbery, quirks of human and animal speech, and the transformation of even the simplest words.”
I love a good self-improvement book about grammar snobbery, but the subhead hints that it may be the reverse. What if it’s a book about throwing out the rules? If it’s my kind of book, somebody tell me, okay? Otherwise, I don’t want to know!