For the most part, when we at Amusing Yarns refer to ourselves in the first-person plural, we actually mean me and myself. I get the occasional assist but this website and the contents thereof are just little diversions I like to make for what I think of as serious knitters who don’t take themselves too seriously. (I won’t attempt to define what a serious knitter is because it’s futile and about as meaningful as differentiating a lowercase knitter from an uppercase knitter. If you found your way to this web page, I’d guess you are a serious knitter or are on the path to becoming one. Do you take yourself too seriously? I couldn’t presume to say, but I suspect I do which is why I try to regularly remind myself that I probably should never assume I don’t. If you follow my meaning.)
I suppose if this website were a properly serious enterprise, one of the things I would do differently is retain some qualified help instead of wearing all the the hats because I’m quite aware that writer, illustrator, photographer, videographer, and copy editor are all things that I am not. These are all jobs that are best left in the hands of those with the appropriate expertise, but this is what you get when you let any knitter with an internet connection create their own content. Fortunately, if the content you find here fails to please, all you have to do is click yourself away and you likely will never be bothered with the sight of my work again. This site will not show up in anyone’s feeds uninvited or make a Top Anything list and I’m actively not trying to change that. That said, I do have standards, even if I don’t always succeed in attaining them, and I do want to create something of use, or at least interest, to some other knitters who aren’t finding what they’re looking for elsewhere.
I would like to be a better writer, illustrator, photographer, videographer, and copy editor but for now, I’m just me, someone trying on those hats for the fun and the challenge of it every now and then.
If at this point you are wondering what brought about this rather defensive exposition today, I’ll have to blame a heightened level of self-doubt on the book I’m currently reading, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. He’s being ironic about anyone, himself included, having the final word on the topic, if that wasn’t clear from the title. Maybe this passage sums up his serious-but-not-too-serious approach best:
The important thing to remember…is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.
One reads a writing style guide presumably for its instructional value but this book serves up instruction with generous amounts of entertainment and sauce, enabling someone (me) of short attention span to keep turning the pages. Plus, I am painfully aware my grammar falls well short of perfection and that I need all the instruction I can get. Making grammatical errors is not unlike having a shred of spinach in your teeth; it’ll happen but you really don’t want anyone to witness it when it does. (The analogy breaks down here because while you do not appreciate someone pointing out your grammatical errors, being left uninformed of the spinach feels a bit like a lapse of human decency.)
You know and I know how absurd it is to judge the worth of a person’s ideas based on their knowledge of the English language (or lack thereof) or because bits of their lunch are stuck in their teeth. The trouble is that most everyone is doing it anyway. Reading a book about English grammar and usage has the unfortunate side effect of pointedly reminding me that I have made and still make plenty of errors. Sure, I’m halfway through this book but if I were to pass a pop quiz on the chapters I’ve read so far, I’m not confident that any flying colours would be involved. In this post you’re reading, I couldn’t positively state there are more deliberate grammatical errors than errors that have been committed unknowingly. (The former falling under the category of “style” and the latter being plain old ignorance, presumably.) There are a lot of rules, for good or bad.[1]
There is one “error” I make intentionally and I know it makes certain types of people cringe if it isn’t making their blood curdle. I am one of those holdouts for the double-space following a period. I like to think the Skidmore eye-tracking study (limited as it is) validates my choice but I know that the internet and virtually every style guide is currently against me and my ilk. Nevertheless, I will carry on (where the text editor permits). Besides, mocking two-spacers is like mocking older people for wearing socks with sandals—it’s kind of mean-spirited and eventually the cool kids will adopt the style precisely because they were advised against it for no better reason than “because it’s ugly.”
A rule that I am prone to breaking, albeit not always intentionally, is that you should adhere to your national spelling style. If you’re American, you color inside the lines and if you’re British, you colour inside the lines. If you’re Canadian, as I am, you aren’t even mentioned in Dreyer’s book, so I presume we are to colour anywhere we please so long as we don’t trouble anyone with annoying questions that can’t be answered.
Canada occupies a rather awkward space. We are neither American nor are we British yet that doesn’t stop us from wanting it all. We knit sweaters and tuques but we can’t help weighing our yarn in grams and washing our woollens in 30°C water. At the same time, some of us feel weird about spinning fibre or mitreing a corner. Maybe that explains my entirely inconsistent approach to British vs. American variants. That and the spell-check functions never knowing which country I’m writing in. Sometimes I get the impression that those software developers weren’t informed that Canada is not the 51st U.S. state or a British colony. Reflexively, I might crab about Canada being perceived as too insignificant in population size, cultural influence, and GDP for anyone to bother about, but I have to admit that we don’t seem to have an established national style unless an inferiority complex counts as one. [2]
Most of Dreyer’s other rules that I break I break unintentionally. I should make a point of memorizing (or is that memorising?) the section on punctuating parenthetical content because I have an incurable addiction to parentheses. For all the rest, I’m sure I’ll try harder from now on, but not that hard because there is no piece of writing that some self-deputized (self-deputised?) grammar cop couldn’t take issue with, and I have yarn that needs knitting.
I also have new articles to post and I need to find a way around some of the obstacles I’ve placed in my own way, such as my insecurities about my writing skills. My short-term solution may just be to preemptively mount a defence—this article, for example—to encase my ego in a sort of psychological Bubble Wrap. It’s an illusion of protection that won’t save my work from criticism or me from embarrassment but it could be a way to let perfect go so I can get something done.[3]
Footnotes
[1] Generally, I am overly fond of rules. I delight in following them, bending them, breaking them, and ridiculing them. They’re barrels of fun! However, I would differentiate between rules that exist to create order, efficiency, and fairness from rules that exist to demonstrate your superiority of taste, knowledge, and class. The former are necessary and if broken, there should be solidly good reasons for it or else there should be consequences, whereas the latter are best when they are smashed or otherwise subverted. Generally speaking.
[2] I know of The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing[4] and I just found I own a (remarkably) pristine 2008 edition of The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. You’d think these would be solid reference books but I get the strong impression that the sections on spelling may no longer apply to anything other than government documents and perhaps university-level essays at this point because it seems that the internet has, in a manner of speaking, torn down the borders.
[3] The saying is “Perfect is the enemy of good” but it works better for me to think of it as “Perfect is the enemy of done.” I stopped aiming for perfect long ago but I still get hung up on good because what is good enough? Is it ever? And so the merry-go-round never ends.
[4] A Google search informs me that The Canadian Style has been transformed into an online resource called Writing Tips Plus which is part of a larger Government of Canada languages resource. Of course, I went straight for the quizzes. My results confirmed that I have forgotten how to spell in Canadian (see footnote [2] re: the internet) and I need to brush up, but for the record, I will always spell yogourt under protest.