GRAMMATICALLY SPEAKING
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Life is too short to be serious.
Life is too short not to be serious.
These statements, sounding opposite, are not.
How can they both be true and correct at the same time?
You might wonder, is this a Schrödinger’s Cat conundrum or something worse?
There are no cats about to die, so stay with me, please.
Is the world a happy place?
Is the world a miserable place?
Well, which is it? Yes, or no?
Can two things be true at the same time?
Of course, but can two ways of thinking simultaneously be alive in one person’s head?
Ask this of the person you see in your mirror – are you happy? Is the world a happy place?
The challenge, the one most apparent to me, is that most days, both are true, and both are not true.
If we are here on this planet for a lifetime but a mere moment in time, what can we do about it? We can choose to do something, try nothing, or try as though this is the only thing in anyone’s life that matters – so many choices, yet so few.
We are or are not the problem, but we are undoubtedly the only solution.
Three quotes I love that would perplex Schrödinger’s Cat:
You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. – Eldridge Cleaver
There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken
Be the change you want to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi (whether that is what he really said is questioned as incorrect or incomplete, but it has inspired so many people, it’s nice to know so many of us love to think he said that)
Noodle on that, eh …
P.S. – an amusement for grammar lovers. When I pasted today’s draft column into Grammarly, which I love, to check my structure and punctuation, its A.I. highlighted a problem regarding the Eldridge Cleaver quote telling me: Faulty parallelism. The structure after ‘either’ does not match the structure after ‘or,’ which may result in a parallelism problem. Consider rewriting the sentence with parallel structure – all of which proves to me that Cleaver’s work and those words, his call to action, would have been pale and less effective if he had chosen to be grammatically correct.
I think it’s perverse that the company I look to for grammar advice, and I love it most of the time because Grammarly has aided my polishing/editing more than it has my writing, but how can a grammar app have a name that is not grammatically correct?
And, to add to that – when I plugged in that comment by Grammarly about the Cleaver quote into Grammarly, it gave me five suggestions for corrections! The world is always, in many ways, a contradictory place!