Being Picky, Or Having Fun

TO BE, OR NOT TO BE....whether 'tis nobler...to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or...take arms against a sea of troubles...How, precisely, do you "take arms" against a sea? By swinging a sword at the water? We have here a mixed metaphor, making no literal sense, courtesy of a despairing Hamlet. Bad usage? T.S. Eliot himself pointed out the mixed metaphorical images, in his brilliant essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Then, my wise father asked me: "But is there any doubt about what old Shakespeare was trying to say?" No, there isn't. Shakespeare teaches that language is art, not science, flexible, not rigid, intuitive, not mathematical. Examples are abundant. The word "unique", say the sticklers, cannot be qualified. something is either unique, or it isn't. Nothing is ever "very unique", or somewhat unique." and yet, the number four trillion five hundred twenty two billion three hundred thirty seven million two hundred fourteen thousand five hundred and eleven is, somehow, more unique than the number three, because it is so very much less common in daily usage. A glass can never be "half empty", I heard a sports caster turned linguist assert. If it contains one drop, or many drops, it has water, and is therefore not empty. But, he maintained, it can be half full. well, whatever... I write and post thousands of essays on this website because I love to write, not because I expect anyone to read them, and I especially expect no one to care enough about my work to critique and correct it, not pickily. Actually, that is the great pleasure of self publishing on the internet; the author is beholden to no one, must please no editor or employer, and if thus perfectly free to do as she or she chooses, and butcher the language at will. I spent twelve years In public school, learning how to use English properly, and ten more years in graduate school being forced to apply what I learned, and decades behind the lectern, expected to impart my knowledge to others, primly and properly, and now, at long last, I am free to have a little fun, and to use this marvelous language "creatively", to the extent I can. and anyway, in a culture in which everyone seems to parrot everyone else, in which all problems are "issues", everyone is "going forward", in which appearances have become "optics" - oh, how clever we think we are when we merely mimic each other and words become fads - who in the hell cares whether the glass is half empty, or whether it is wrong for it to be that way. We all know exactly what a half empty glass is, do we not?