I was largely educated in convent schools where wooden rulers and thick books (Wren&Martin) flew through the air and landed on unsuspecting hands and back with unfailing frequency. They were almost always accompanied by beady-eyed looks of utter disapproval and disappointment by nuns sporting sparse to scary amounts of mouthbrows. Yikes!
Add to that my father’s continuous litany of ‘Perfection Is NOT an accident!!’ and you have a person who is a bit uptight about her language and the way it gets expressed.
Red has some lovely memories of me scrunching up my face going ‘what the..!’ during the time we were dating; they usually involved something he said which I knew was pronounced differently and it was *quite* a task not correcting him then or even now.
This is not to say my spoken English or English comprehension is sublime. It’s good, that’s all there is to it. And given the number of girls who studied with me, there are hundreds of us out there with a good level of competency in their English grammar, syntax and expression.
But habits die hard. Good or bad; they really do die hard. So when I come back from the gym achy, sweaty, wondering why the space below my knees feels like it’s tied up in knots and my kid, seeing me for the first time in the day, starts talking by using double negatives…the experience is just GAH!!
Sadly, I’m not sure what the more painful part of that whole thing is.
Random. Structured. Haphazard. All Me. 