Rev. Martin Luther King pointed out that “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  For a good case in point look no further than actor Charlie Sheen, who claimed “I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity and you know they lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and look at their loser lives and then they look at me and they say, ‘I can’t process it’ well, no, you never will stop trying, just sit back and enjoy the show. You know?”  When it comes to our language, all too often sincere people enjoy viciously picking grammatical nits.  Bitter debates rage over proper usage of irregular verbs, semicolons, and em dashes, “a dash (—) one em long” according to Collins Dictionary.  Webster’s says “the em dash is the length of a capital M, it will surprise no one that the so-called ‘en dash’ is the approximate length of a capital N, –,” and hyphens are even shorter.  There are pedants who will go to war over many aspects of grammar, but my preferred grammatical battlefields are typing two spaces after periods and Oxford commas.

Jennifer Gonzales, the editor-in-chief of the Cult of Pedagogy website devoted to assisting teachers in their craft, felt a little stupid after writing an essay titled “Nothing Says Over-40 Like Two Spaces After a Period!” in which she claimed that using two spaces between sentences is widely despised and symptomatic of being oldsters raised on typewriters.  She followed with a second essay, “The Price of Snark: What I learned About Teaching from a Viral Post.”  Her first post was met with a deluge of opposition.  She wrote in the second that “What bothered me the most was not that people disagreed with me, it was their snarky, hostile tone …. And then it hit me: They were being mean because I was being mean first.”  She cited one thoughtful, unsnarky reply that made her think: “Jennifer – I respect your right to use one space. I do, however, take issue with three things about your post. The first, and by far the most important, is your support of the denigration of older people …. Your post, and your follow up comments, state that the reason people incorrectly (in your view) use two spaces after a full stop is because they are old, ignorant, and stuck in their old ways. This is offensive. Is this really what you want the teachers who look to you for advice to be teaching their students?”  In fact, the National Library of Medicine posted, “One Space Between Each Sentence, They Said.  Science just proved them wrong.”  The authors, Rebecca Johnson, et al., cited a study in the American Psychological Association (APA) that observed readers’ eye-tracking and learned that “initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces.”  The APA’s Publication Manual currently states “In general, double-space all parts of an APA Style paper.”

My pal, the Oxford comma (AKA serial comma), is defined by Robert Brewer, the Writer’s Digest’s Senior Editor, as “the comma that follows the penultimate item in a list of three or more things …. As far as I can tell, the main argument against using the Oxford comma is that it’s somehow easier to not insert a comma.”  He then gave some examples of the confusion that springs from omitting the Oxford comma: “We invited my parents, Thomas and Nancy.”  Omitting the comma after “Thomas” muddies the water.  Are the parents named Thomas and Nancy, or are four people being invited?  Being an Oxford comma fancier myself, I’m with Brewer who concluded “I loathe excess, but the consistent use of the Oxford comma actually makes language—reading and writing—so much easier to comprehend; and that’s why I love it!”  And please note those em dashes.

While on the topic of commas, we should explore the more arcane “Apposition and Anarthrous Premodifiers,” as described in a Daily Writing Tips article.  Today we’ll ignore “anarthrous” and focus on Collins Dictionary definition of  “apposition” as “a grammatical construction in which a word, especially a noun phrase, is placed after another to modify its meaning …. When one of the nouns simply restates the other one, commas are needed to set it off.”  In the example, “Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth US president, ranks among the three worst presidents of the United States,” “‘the seventeenth US president’ is just another way of saying ‘Andrew Johnson’.  It provides additional information but leaving it out would not change the meaning …. The additional information is non-essential, so it is set off with commas.”  Rogue commas can make big differences in legal cases, as recounted in “Can a Comma Solve a Crime?,” an article by Julia Ayuso in TheDial.world, an online magazine of journalism from across the globe that was begun by former editors from the Atlantic, Politico, and the New York Review of Books.

Ayuso wrote last November about the unsolved 1984 murder of Grégory Villemin, a 4-year-old boy in France who was tied up and drowned, saying “The case has been reopened several times, and multiple suspects have been arrested,” including his mother (charged but acquitted), his father (who murdered a prime suspect and served time) and other family members.  The parents received several threatening hand-written letters, so in 2020 “police brought in a team of Swiss linguists from a company called OrphAnalytics to examine the letters and their use of vocabulary, spelling and sentence structure. Their report … pointed to Grégory’s great-aunt, Jacqueline Jacob. The results echoed earlier handwriting and linguistic analysis that had led to Jacob and her husband’s arrest in 2017. (The couple was freed later that year over procedural issues).”  Such linguistic investigators are known in France as stylologists, and they “argue that style is almost impossible to hide because many of the choices we make are unconscious. Someone may decide to spell a word wrong, but forget to modify less noticeable details, such as their use of punctuation.”

Few crime writers have ever matched the stylistic mastery of Raymond Chandler, who could be quite persnickety when that was challenged.  He had an amusing but firm correspondence with his proofreader at The Atlantic, one Margaret Mutch, that’s included in the large handsome book “Letter of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience.”  After describing several potential titles to an article he’d written, Chandler  asked “would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois, which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with my eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”  Mutch responded, apparently cordially, for Chandler responded with a long, amusing poem, “Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive.”  It’s 36 double stanzas long and begins, “Miss Margaret Mutch she raised her crutch With a wild Bostonian cry.  ‘Though you went to Yale, your grammar is frail,’ She snarled as she jabbed his eye.”  After several witty poetic examples, Chandler wrote, “O leave us dance on the dead romance Of the small but clear footnote.  The infinitive with my fresh-honed shiv I will split from heel to throat.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German minister, was outspoken for a more noble cause: publicly opposing and acting forcefully against the Nazi government’s mounting atrocities in the 1930s and 1940s, before Hitler ordered him hung weeks before the war ended.  His story’s too moving and important to try to encapsulate here and will be saved for a future column.  However, Bonhoeffer wrote an important essay on “the Theory of Stupidity,” and that was described in an article by Jonny Thomson, an Oxford don specializing in philosophy, and he also has a blog titled “Mini Philosophy” in which he cogently condenses important philosophical concepts that seem relevant today, like “gretchenfrage,” a German term for “the kind of question that cuts to the heart of an issue. It stops dancing around in pleasantries and is shocking in its frankness.  A partner asks, ‘Are you cheating on me?’  A journalist asks, ‘Did you lie?’  We ask the mirror, “Are you happy?’  Gretchenfrage is a reckoning.  It’s an unflinching, unavoidable crux point.”  “Phronimos” is a term from Aristotle that Thomson described as “There are people in our life we turn to when we need guidance.  There are sages who have enough time-earned wisdom to give great advice.  Just as we turn to a doctor about disease, we turn to the phronimos about how to live a good life.   E.B. White, one of the 20^th century’s greatest essayists, is one of my phronimos.  His response to a letter from a man who was despairing of all that’s wrong in the world is included in “Letters of Note” and reminds me so of brave Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  “As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.  Hope is the thing that is left to us in bad times.”  And in times of great stupidity as well.