Relative Something

There is something right around the corner and you can just sense that it will influence your otherwise uneventful experience of late. But there is no corner. Why do we say things like, “The corner of my mind?” Metaphoric corners are rolling around us all the time. The word “corner” looks just fine until you focus on the word “corn” and then you get that strange feeling that it doesn’t look like a correctly spelled word at all. How is it that our mind can suddenly see a group of characters of the alphabet in such a way that the word formed looks totally nonsensical? I have found myself pausing in disbelief at the word, “then” as if there were no way it could possibly be a word, even though logic led me to carry on as if it must be legitimate. This might explain why I have neglected to master a second language all these years. I can hardly maintain order in my head with the words of the language I grew up speaking.

Any credit for understanding the English language should go to my ears and the blessing of having parents who spoke properly. When rules of grammar were being taught in grade school, I quickly discovered that the correct answer was simply the one that sounded right to me. Unfortunately, that means I didn’t ever really memorize the actual rules of grammar. That will be visible in my writing style, where I often opt for choosing to lay out a sentence in a manner that reflects how it sounds to me when spoken, which sometimes turns out to be grammatically incorrect.

I still find myself occasionally choosing to follow a few grammar rules that result in written sentences sounding different than the way I would actually say things, but it is because there are times when doing so just reads better. I credit that to the reading I do and how I ‘hear’ the words written by professional journalists. I don’t know if everyone ‘listens’ to the words and sentences they read in their mind to the same extent that I do. (I think it makes me a slower reader.) I have a tendency to mimic what I see and hear, for better or worse. My writing will tend to reflect the writing of others that appeal to me.

When I edit, I don’t always know what is correct for a given sentence, but I usually sense when it just doesn’t sound right. I credit my parents for the way they spoke and also for their habit of having a radio or television on where I heard broadcasts of WCCO and dialects that most closely matched what I found to read in published works. I have no idea what led me to start thinking about things like corners of a mind or why I see things from a somewhat skewed vantage point at times. I guess it’s just a relative point of view. Relative to something.