A Word, Please:

Here’s a math conundrum that only a grammar person can explain: If one person has one grammar question, how many grammar questions do 100 people have? Mathematically speaking, it would make sense to guess 100. Statistically speaking, it would make sense to guess somewhere between one and 100. But only in the grammar world does one times 100 equal zero.

Allow me to explain.

On Nov. 6 I had the honor of serving as a guest speaker at the Sacramento conference of the California Assn. of College Stores, the group representing those campus retailers who sell everything from textbooks to T-shirts. As always, I ended the talk with a question-and-answer session, encouraging people to ask any and all grammar questions they might have. One woman had a question about reference books. One man had a question about William Safire. But none of the roughly 100 people present had a grammar question.

After the talk, while signing books, I had a chance to talk with perhaps 50 of them individually. And, here comes the funny part: Many of them had grammar questions. So, while 100 people had no questions, any member of that 100 was likely to have one (or two or three).

Obviously, the best academic discipline for explaining this phenomenon is neither mathematics nor grammar. It’s psychology. Through its lens, the answer is obvious: People don’t like to air their grammar inadequacies.

But, with me around, what happens in Sacramento doesn’t stay in Sacramento. That’s lucky because it turns out that other people’s grammar inadequacies are usually more universal than they realize. And, in them, there are lessons for us all.

For example, one woman wanted to know whether you can start a sentence with “but.” She had an interesting reason for asking. She once had a teacher who insisted that it was wrong to begin any sentence with “but” and who would mark down students for using it. Not long afterward, she took a class with a teacher who said that was hogwash. The second teacher even offered an impressive piece of evidence: the United States Constitution.

So the nice lady wanted to know once and for all who was right. Is it OK to start a sentence with “but,” and was her more agreeable teacher right to cite the Constitution as a source?