On a recent visit to the coffee shop, my wife described something — I don’t even recall what — to me, saying “. . . it runs the full gamut . . .” As a dues-paying member of the grammar school police athletic league, I corrected her — the gamut is the full — the complete — something. She is quite used to this by now, having me say things that only show that I’m paying attention in a vaguely insulting way — and didn’t throw her whole milk latte at me, perhaps because it was an excellent latte, and not worth wasting on me. Literally (as the ubiquitous they too frequently say). Told me I was wrong, and gave me a patent-pending shut-up look.

I did shut up. And, because that’s the kind of hair-pin I am, when I got home I looked up the definition of gamut (don’t judge me).

And found it described as being the complete range or scope of something, as in — and this was their example — “the whole gamut of human emotion.”

Hold on a minute there, pard. If gamut means complete, then why say the “whole complete?” Or, rather, what I should be saying is this is wrong. Bad grammar, right?

But I’ve always heard the phrase as “running the full/whole gamut.” Can it be bad grammar if it’s what we’ve always said? Is there a . . . a statute of limitations . . .on mistakes in jargon or idiomatic phrases that eventually permits them to be led over to the light side of the Force?

Of course there is. The Milton I read at gunpoint forty years ago is full of antiquated English (even for forty years ago) and annoying syntactical constructions that we don’t use anymore. Thank God for that. Time’s inexorable passage, and the Atlantic Ocean, often divide our language between and betwixt.

So what are the rules? How long do we have to muddle through before we can pitch certain turns of phrase into the trash bin of time? Is it a Somerset Maugham sort of thing, that there’s a rule, but no one knows what it is? And are we spending too much precious time thinking about it?

I saw a social media post in which someone asked if readers prefer good grammar in a workmanlike story to spelling/punctuation hiccups in an excellent yarn. Not that they worded their question in this fashion, but this was the general gist of their post. (Which, of course, is one of those pizza pie tautological idioms in that “gist” already means “central idea” which implies generality, anyhow. For crying out loud. It’s a wonder we get anything across to one another at all.)

Anyway, I vacillated between wanting good grammar — that is, well edited prose — and a rattling good story.

Why? Well, because I think (therefore, I deserve heaps of righteous emotional scorn) we ought to rely on good copyeditors to fix faulty grammar and punctuation, or, as an excellent friend calls it, the myriad jots and tittles in a story’s layout. But . . . who’s going to make a story a better story? Another writer? Maybe, but probably not. There are definitely rules for that, in the section referencing copyright.

We could fill a book, and mightily boring it would be, with social media’s coffee-table discussion about grammar and language and idiom, and the mistakes we keep making, as speaking and writing humans. And most of that would be plagiarism of a sort; tidbits we’ve picked up from hyped-up memes and other folks’ stale jokes. Autocorrect. Possessive vs. plural. Word choice boners. Typographical miscues.

We’re beating a dead horse. Belaboring the obvious. Other stale chestnuts.

At least, I think so. Perhaps others consider this a conversational tool, a way to find common ground, by agreeing to others’ faults. Perhaps not.

What happens when we read? What is the deal between us? I imagine we enter the compact of author/reader under the assumption that we are equals — two people attempting to make something of the words on the page? Or is the author a higher authority? No pun intended.

Furthermore, what is the relationship between author and editor? Is there a secret handshake there as well? Creator and pre-critic, scribbler and proofreader. Submitter and decision-maker. Shots are fired across the bows. Second spaces after periods, to em-dash or not to em-dash, how many dots in an ellipsis, and what the hell is the point of a prologue, anyway? These minutiae of language litter certain online battlefields where word people go to find someone who understands, they hope, their Eliotesque wasteland angst.

As for me, I’m on the fence. I like diving into a story as much as anyone, but hiccup when there are no quotes around dialogue. On another hand, I could care less about one or two spaces after a period. I mean that. I can always care less about something.

Epilogue: The world keeps turning and anyone looking at the writing community’s posts would think we’ve all lost our everloving, blue-eyed minds. Something I found in my own notes — “I made my wife dinner for Valentine’s Day smacks troublingly of cannibalism.”

And speaking of the changing language, I recently told my oldest daughter that there was a time when television ads used to try to get housewives to buy a particular brand of dishwashing liquid because it would keep its bubbles longer, and therefore wash more dishes. The selling point was that you saved some number of pennies per meal, and sure, wasn’t that what you wanted to do to help out around the household?

Her response to me? “Dad, what the fuck is a housewife?”

Boom, baby.

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