That’s the question the second grader asked me. I paused, scratched my metaphorical head, and asked her to use it in a sentence. “You know,” she said. “Like, I woodna done that if youda said not to.” I of course seized the teachable moment and explained that woodna was really two words if you didn’t count the two parts of the contraction, which if you did count them would make it three. I even threw in some juicy tidbits about apostrophes. She listened wisely, wrote down the correct spelling, and shortly thereafter raised her hand again. “How to you spell saposta?” she asked me.

Spelling! English is notorious, of course, for funky spelling, and some folks never get tired of pointing that out. I realize that “rough,” “through,” “cough,” and “bough” do not rhyme, and I even find it kind of cute. I don’t know much about the history of the evolution of the fine-tuning of the English language, but I think maybe the spelling has failed to keep up with the evolving pronunciation. 

And why do we have to have so many homophones?  The “theres” and the “yours” may eventually lead me to require blood pressure medication. I find myself wondering if I should have placed apostrophes in the words in quotes, as in “there’s” and “your’s.” Flexible rule #27:  when you use a word as the word itself. . .

I have heard that the Russian language has no homophones at all. Really, why do we need them?  Anybody with an even rudimentary knowledge of permutations should know that there are surely enough distinct combinations of phonemes to get our thoughts organized without having to repeat anything. I also would like to point out that Spanish, while it uses numerous contractions, does not use the apostrophe. I propose that we remove, by decree or by simple civil disobedience, the apostrophe from our language. You go first.

I’ve spent the better part of the last thirty years in some capacity or other trying to teach children to spell. I’ve worked with every grade level and combination thereof that has yet been invented for public school. And I have come to the sad conclusion that there are two kinds of people in the word: those who know which “there” they should use, and those who will never, ever understand the difference of why it should matter.

There are memes galore. Old ladies in shackles for defacing signs (i.e., correcting the grammar). How to soothe a grammar Nazi (say softly, “there, they’re, their”). A dangling modifier walked into a bar. People love to buy me books about words, and I always get the questions about whether to use an apostrophe, and if so, which side of the s does it go. Even if I don’t get the question, I make sure to chime in anyway.

The weird part is that I’m not that good. My plans for a degree in English gave way to teaching. My dreams of being a professional writer have yet to gain traction. I have an intrinsic understanding of how to write, I know what’s correct and what isn’t just by the feel of it, and I can put together a decent poem from time to time. But I don’t really know English grammar. I use a lot of expressions, and I know I’m using them correctly, but I couldn’t tell you why. Every grammar book I read (yes, I read grammar books) tells me something I didn’t already know, but I always have this sneaking suspicion that they still haven’t covered everything. Exactly what verb tense is “might have been going to go”?  As in, “I might have been going to go crazy”?

The bottom line is that I love language. It is one of the things that truly makes us human, and the common threads that run through families of languages, as well as the utter alien-ness of other languages, are things that I never get tired of. I continue my quest to learn a phrase or two in every language that I encounter. Occasionally, I even remember these phrases for the long term. And I do try to spell everything correctly, because that’s what a good writer is saposta do.