Period Space Space

After a recent conversation with my husband, I have confirmed two things that I've known about myself for quite some time:

I am stubborn.
I do not like to change comfortable things for arbitrary reasons.

I was taught to type with two spaces following a period.  Just like that.  I type that way because it is the way I learned to type, though my husband, a mere 3 years younger learned and was forced to use a single space to separate his sentences.  I didn't know the technical reasons behind it.  Mavis Beacon never told me, and I never asked.  MLA has changed in more ways than I care to think about since my days of term papers and essays, and since I'm not a formal writer, I... don't care.  This is just one more area where I agree with Allie Brosh: Double Space Forever! 

The double space may be "an artifact left over from manual-type and typewriters where characters could not be kerned to correct for the relatively tiny space a period takes up,"* but I work off of muscle memory and sheer determination, so stopping to delete an instinctive space just isn't going to happen until I'm forced to by the folks at MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, or the AP Stylebook.  They'll have to send their ninja-like assassins after me with a long list of crimes including: abuse of the dash, disregard for the semi-colon, defamation of the parentheses, ignoring natural sentence breaks in favor of dangerously long run-on sentences, and questionable grammatical constructs.  Until that time, I will continue to bend, twist, and abuse the English language to fit my own whims.  I will use the Oxford optional comma.  In fact, I will use commas as breath marks, because that's the way I talk.  It's a combination of stubbornness rooted in laziness fed to the fire of indignation over having to change something for no reason that seems valid to the publication in which I write.  Space isn't limited here at the Parade.  Space for all!  Space for spaces, and space for commas, and space for whatever I feel.

I herby denounce all other style guides and vow to write by the Bean Language Association Style Guide.  It goes like this--write like you talk.


That's it.  Oh, wait, an addendum:

(Because it wouldn't be a style guide if it hadn't been changed on the whim of the authors after sobering up or coming down off their soap-box)

Write like you think, or with as many of the things you remember from your schooling years as possible, but if you forget al the myriad rules of grammar and punctuation, don't beat yourself with wet noodles.  Learn the basics.  Understand homophones and how to work spell-check.  Then, go!  Be free!

The End
 
Gee, this sounds sort of revolutionary, or at least reactionary.  It's not.  I'm hardly unorthodox.  Clinging to old familiar traditions because the new way is functionally useless when applied to my life isn't very cutting edge or exciting.  It's not hip.  It's stodgy.  Ooooh... stodgy.  What a great word!  I'll be un-radical and stodgy about my type formatting, and as I told my hubby, MLA can go suck an egg.  In this one area, I don't particularly care what people think.  If the format and presentation of my round-abou, half-baked, hare-brained ideas is irritating to you, my condolences.  Now go away.  I have punctuation to use precariously.

*My Husband, 2010.  I'm not going to use MLA formatted footnotes to quote him either.  No bibliography or anything.

Oh! That reminds me

I have the somewhat dubious honor of having had my... unusual style of verbal communication diagrammed by a very smart man whose job it is to analyze and explain data.

Now, if you've ever had a conversation with a talkative 4 year old, then you're somewhat familiar with my way of speaking.

"Tangential" is a bit of an understatement.  So, this man, who thankfully is a dear friend, so I don't have to be quite so embarassed or harrass him until he retracts the diagram, was sitting in a meeting one day at the office, and decided that the best use of his considerable intellect was to diagram a recent conversation, which was fairly typical of most conversations.

Now, as he is smarter than me in a number of different areas, I can't quite recreate what he came up with, but I'm going to try to at least outline what I remember of his explaination.  And if you don't think that it's a surreal, enlightening, humbling and awkward experience to have someone explain you to yourself, then you live in a world where the sky is perhaps a different color...

So, the base line in this example will be that thing that I started talking about, the story I set out to tell.  For today, we'll use the color purple, and why it's my favorite.

Now, imagine that as a straight line.  Everytime I remember something else I want to say, or get reminded of anther story, that creates a line that branches off from the main line, and if while telling a side story, I think of another story, then that story is added on to the branch, sort of like a wonky family tree of stories...

Now, this smart man who is my friend went a step further, and identified the most common phrases that indicate a branch is about to begin.  From what I can recall, and in thinking of the way I speak, here's an abbreviated list:

Oh! That reminds me...

And another thing...

And one time...

Which is funny because...

Although...

Of course, if I ever remember my original intent, there is often the utterance of:
What was I talking about?
How did we get here?
Um... where was I?
Which is followed by "Oh! right..."

So in the end, you wind up with something like this, for the following conversation:

So, purple is my favorite color, as I've said lots before, and it's been my favorite color as long as I can remember.  Purple and pink were my favorites when I was little, which is funny because when I was little I called it "purkle" and now my whole family still pronounces it that way when talking to me, Oh! That reminds me, my friend's mom used to say it "permple" like her whole life, not just as a kid... what was I talking about? Oh, right...  so, I always said I had two favorite colors, because I have a hard time making decisions, but purple was always one of them.  Purple and pink, then purple and blue, then purple and green, which is eventually what I had for my wedding, although it's strange to me that even though it's my favorite color, none of my formal dresses were ever purple.  I wore black, navy, red, ivory, navy again, but not purple.  I think it's because I got teased in middle school for wearing purple all the time, so I stopped wearing it.  I even had these purple acid wash Wranglers.  And another thing, I mean I grew nearly 10 inches in 3 years, so it's not like any of my clothes fit well to begin with, so I got teased about always having high-waters because my pants weren't long enough, and we all know that being a tall girl is hard enough especially in the pants department, because finding pants that are long enough is hard, but finding stylish pants that are long enough is impossible.  And I didn't even have to worry about hips back then.  How did I get here?  Oh! right... so, yeah, I eventually got over being teased and now most of my closet is purple, because it's my favorite color.

All facts represented above are true and acurate. I don't think I've ever had exactly that conversation before... because it isn't really a conversation here, it's more of a rambly monologue... I can't account for the tangents that would be sparked by the introduction of outside information from the people I would share such an innane tale with, so this is a fairly mild example.  Typical true conversations might look more like this:

So, that's a conversation with me... as far as I can remember from the telling from my very smart, wonderful friend.

A brazillion is five, and that's not a euphemism

So, everyone develops their own sort of language among friends... a conglomeration of hilarious misspoken words, inside jokes, and nonsense that stitches together the people you spend your life talking to.  I've been adopted into several lovely groups of friends, each with their own little lexicon, and along the way, those words have become so entwined with my own strange word choices that sometimes I forget that if I say something is adorkable, the whole world doesn't automagically know what I was meanting.  Look at me, I was just kidding.

A hilarious example that I was sadly not present for, but thoroughly enjoy the retelling of--and I may have the actual details wrong, but it goes something like this: