A Column by John Estridge
During the mid 1970s when we were still savages without Internet, cell phones or even cable TV, I spent one year at Indiana State University in the lovely smelling, picturesque city of Terre Haute.
In the first semester of my freshman year, and my only year of full-time college life, I did well academically. I actually went to class – even the 8 a.m. classes — and attempted to study as much as I could with friends who enjoyed loud rock and roll, 3.2 beer from Illinois and hand-rolled cigarettes.
Paying for the first semester out of money I had earned doing odd jobs from the age of 8, my major was creative writing, which really did not go well with my common-sense-driven dad who had a Depression-era base. That base gave him a practicality and sense that his son should seek a career that paid well. He did not see that occurring with a creative writing major.
However, the 18-year-old me thought I knew much more than my parents and went boldly on with an endeavor to become a novelist.
My first creative writing class was something of a disappointment for me. The man who taught it seemed to care much more for grammar than creative writing ability. His rules, which threw terror into my young heart was this: One grammatical error, no matter how interesting the writing was, was a “C.” Two grammatical errors was an “F” and more than two he tore up the papers.
Thank God for Mrs. Smelser and other English teachers at Short High School and later Union County High School in Liberty.
I did not realize it at the time, but I had a better grammatical feel for the English language than any of my peers in that class. I experienced more than one person sobbing quietly in the class. I got one “C,” no “Fs,” no torn up papers and the rest “As.”
Fast forward to 1989 and my start in writing full time for the Connersville News Examiner, my first full-time job in journalism, and I had seemingly forgotten all of those grammatical rules. In fact, it was 14 years after that creative writing class, and I had not thought of grammar in all that time. Also, that year, 1989, was before Windows or anything resembling the Word program. We used something called MS-DOS and did not know any better.
Spell check was in its infancy and seeing the News Examiner had just purchased its first Fax machine, spell check did not enter the building for years.
My first bad experience was an article about a Fayette County School Corporation Board of Trustees meeting where the board members discussed a new absentee policy, involving the words excused and unexcused.
We had to write on deadline, and I was new to all that. I came to enjoy writing on deadlines, but at that time, I was afraid of getting fired and losing my dream job. My dad passed in 1980 so he did not have to watch me earning about minimum wage, or in fact, less than minimum wage when all the hours I worked were figured in for my dream job and loving every second of it.
During the course of the article, I used the words excused and unexcused about 100 times each. I was very proud of that article until after the papers had been printed, Kimball Hendrix, the reporter who sat next to me, pointed out I had misspelled excused and unexcused about 100 times each. I spelled them exscused and unexscused.
And, remember, it was an article about a school board, meaning education.
I was mortified. But I somehow managed not to get fired even after my editor made me write the Correction piece where I proved I knew the correct spelling of correction, excused and unexcused.
Another few years later I was the Brookville Democrat/American editor. At a Franklin County Commissioners meeting, which was held in the Franklin County Courthouse, an older woman, probably younger than I am now, attended the meeting with her husband. I do not remember what had brought them to the meeting. After the meeting was over and we were walking down the courthouse hallway, she said she really enjoyed my writing style. That made me happy. However, she was a retired English teacher and informed me my grammar was horrible. She promised to send me copies of the newspapers after she had marked them in red.
In fact, she had one issue in her purse, brought it to the meeting hoping she would meet me and gave it to me. It looked as if it had been stabbed in an artery and had sprayed blood everywhere.
I cannot play poker because – as a friend once told me – “I can tell every card you are holding just by looking at your face” – I stopped dead in my tracks and I know the look on my face was one of pure mortification. My friend would have said I had been dealt a hand of cards without even a pair of twos to show.
Her husband told her to go on to the car, and he walked back to where I was standing still in shock and hoping my heart would start beating again. I was staring at that red newspaper with a little black newsprint thrown in.
He took the issue from my hand, apologized and told me I would never see a bleeding issue again.
While he was true to his word, that really got me so I began to study grammar once more. I still am not as good as I was that first semester of my freshman year, but I am not as bad as the guy who misspelled exscused or authored those bleeding articles.
To get to why I wrote this column and if there was any meaning to the about 500 words before this paragraph, there are some things that really get on my nerves about the state of writing and the English language in general in 2020. Along with everyone else, I am wishing my life away and hoping 2020 ends as soon as possible. An aside here is I read an article the other day where killer whales, orcas, are attacking shipping off the coast of Spain and Portugal. It is not known why but for smaller craft, especially, it has become very discomfiting. However, I think it is just another unexplainable, strange event in this very strange, unexplainable year.
But to get back on track: one of the things that really upset me is the misuse of the words lead and led.
My youngest child, Renee, teaches pre-school in Tokyo Japan. She works in a Canadian school. Before that, she helped teach English to rural youths in Japan. We talked about the troublesome areas of the English language and words such as lead came up.
Lead is the metal. Lead is to lead a horse to water. Led is the past tense of lead as in I led the horse to water yesterday. This is from grammarly.com, which was not available in 1989 or when the retired teacher scared the crap out of me.
The past tense of the verb lead is led, not lead. One reason for the confusion might be that a similar verb, read, has an infinitive that’s spelled the same as the past tense. … Led is the correct way to spell the past tense of lead. Lead is a common misspelling of the past tense of the verb lead.
Led and lead have been under my skin for some time, but this is the proverbial straw: It was written on novelsuspects.com by “Liberty Hardy is a Book Riot senior contributing editor, co-host of All the Books, a Book of the Month judge, and above all else, a ravenous reader. She resides in Maine with her cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon. You can see pictures of her cats and book hauls on Twitter.”
This is what she wrote: “Frank Temple III has been struggling to make sense of life ever since he discovered his U.S. Marshall father lead a double life as a contract killer seven years earlier…”
OMG
She is a senior contributing editor. Let me repeat OMG.
And that is just one misuse of one word. Thinking about the misuse of the variations of “there” and “your” just gives me a migraine. So, with the migraine caused by the misuse of much of the English language in this horrific year of 2020, “I am exscusing myself and hope never to get lead to another article where the English language are so butchered.”
Oh, John! Your columns never disappoint.