Editing prodigy or pretentious pedant? You decide!

Monday I got new reading glasses (pictures to follow in a later post). They are really swell, with flexible frames, protective and anti-reflective coating, and transition lenses so I can read outside. They also have rubberized temples for a finer, lighter chew.

My new glasses triggered a memory from childhood, and one thing led to another.

When I was in elementary school, I got books from the Scholastic Book Club, and one of the offerings was a book of clever things to write in people's autograph books (of the "Yours till Niagara Falls" ilk). I didn't get the book, but some of my classmates did. I remember reading what one of them wrote in another's autograph book:

When you are old
And cannot see,
Put on your specks
And think of me.

I said to the writer, "You misspelled the word. 'Specks' are little marks or dots. You mean s-p-e-c-s, which is short for spectacles."

As early as second grade I was at it. In shop class, one of the girls had done a fine job of sanding her wood project and invited her buddies to feel it. "It's so soft!" she said. I said, "It's not 'soft.' It's smooth." (Or as Dad would have said, "It's not just smooth. It's smewwwwth!")

Our neighbor John H. had a rabbit that he decided to call "Fluffily." I told him that the rabbit could be named "Fluff" or "Fluffy," but "Fluffily" was not right the word. I had understood, almost instinctively at a tender age, the difference between adjectives and adverbs.

Had I known then that I could get paid for correcting people's grammar and spelling, I probably would have started being obnoxious even earlier in life.


Fluffily the Chihuahua sez, "I'm going to kill them for not letting me get contacts."