Today’s post was inspired by something I noticed in yesterday’s Snuffy Smith comic strip. Loweezy (Snuffy’s wife) is telling an unhappy little Tater “It takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown.”

That sentence bothered me, and I was still thinking about it this morning. It’s an interesting problem: The strip was too grammatical. Here’s how the characters in the Snuffy Smith strip usually speak: “Prob’ly warning ‘em not to tangle wif US!!” Loweezy, a minimally educated resident of Hootin’ Holler, would have said “less muscles.” 

We English teachers keep insisting that good English usage is akin to a moral issue: It’s the right thing to do. I’m thinking that there’s another, deeper reason for paying attention to usage: You don’t want to distract your readers. They should be paying attention to what you wrote rather than how you wrote it (unless you’re a postmodern author – but that’s a subject for another post).

I recall reading a mystery novel that drove me crazy because the main character was an English teacher who was telling the story in her own words.  She made several pronoun errors and constantly misspelled all right. That’s not how English professors write. (Interestingly, the book was done by a fine publisher that seems to have laid off its copyeditors to save money.)

Loweezy and Tater started me thinking about other distractions. Here’s one. Before I get into it, I need to explain that I hate the word respective. It’s almost always unnecessary, and writers who use it sound pompous.

I also need to explain that I adore Carole King (yes, I checked to make sure she spells Carole with that final “e”!). She has three marvelous things going for her – she co-wrote the song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” she published a wonderful memoir (A Natural Woman), and she always looks like she’s having an absolutely fabulous time.

Back to respective. She used it no less than seven times in her book, always unnecessarily. I read the book quickly, so I was very aware that the respectives kept coming. Why, Carole, why?

Can I give you an example? I defy you to give me a reason why there’s a respective in this sentence about Sir Paul McCartney’s delightful mimicry during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman:

Playing the respective roles of David Letterman and Paul Shaffer, McCartney completely captured the essence of both men.

Can we do one more? You may have heard of Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a terrific writer who’s also Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law. In 1976 Marjorie publishedThey Came to Stay, the true-life story of how she adopted two little girls from Asia. It’s a wonderful book, but one thing drove me crazy: Every time she sat down, she said she “slipped” into a chair. That’s fine once or twice, but after a while I started imagining her stepping on a banana peel and whizzing across the floor. Just sit down, dammit!

OK, I’m almost finished – but please let me make one more point. I think my English-teacher rants over the years missed an important angle. I kept talking about good usage as an abstract idea. The more important factor is that good usage sweeps away the distractions so that readers can settle back and enjoy what you’re reading. Forty years later, do you really want your audience to picture you slipping on a banana peel?