There’s No Mistake--It Looks Like Another Perfect Year

Time is running out for 1992, but I am still two short of my quota of only two mistakes of grammar or fact a year.

Actually, my perfect record, so far, may in part be due to the fact that I am now writing only one column a week, not five, as I used to. That greatly reduces my opportunities for error. I should point out that errors of judgment do not count.

In fact, I should note that I have been accused of several errors. My irregulars are always on my back, but I think I can say honestly that in every case I have been able to demonstrate the inaccuracy of those complaints.

Recently, for example, I have been accused of erring in writing of our attempts at having a cat spayed. It was the cat that hung about the back door of our condo when my family spent a week in Park City, Utah.

In my first column on that sojourn, I wrote: “One afternoon a cat appeared at our screen door. He was white with sort of a beige undercoat.”

In a second column I wrote that my son Doug phoned an animal friends group about the cat. “He said he wanted them to pick up our cat and have it spayed.”

“I read the male cat in your column is about to be spayed,” wrote Miriam V. Anderson. “Either the animal is a rare hermaphrodite, or you are about to admit your second mistake of the year. Please explain.”

“Isn’t it only females that are spayed?” wrote Arlene Jenkins. “Males are altered-- a softer euphemism for castrated. “

Well, of course I know that females are spayed and males are castrated, a word that I no longer avoid since I was corrected by the young woman at my vet’s when I said altered.

To spay is to sterilize a female animal by removing the ovaries. Since males have no ovaries to remove, they cannot be spayed.

You will note that while I called the cat “he” in the earlier column, I referred to it only as “it” in the later one when I talked about having it spayed.

I submit that my he in the first column was the generic he, since at that time I didn’t know the sex of the cat. Later, when my son referred to it as it, I assumed that it meant female, since he was talking about having her spayed.

In any case, I do not think that I can be accused of writing incorrectly that the cat to be spayed was a male, and I am not counting it as an error.

I may be more vulnerable on another point in that second column on our Utah holiday. I wrote that we drove out to Promontory Point, “where, on May 10, 1869, a Union Pacific locomotive from Omaha, Neb., met a Central Pacific from Sacramento to complete the first intercontinental railroad.”

“Actually,” writes the erudite Harry Cimring, “it was the first transcontinental railroad, crossing, as it did, the North American continent. An intercontinental railroad would be one that went from one continent to another--from Mexico to Panama (North America to South America).”

(Actually, Panama is in Central America, not South America, but that does not invalidate Mr. Cimring’s point.)

The same objection to my use of “intercontinental” was raised by Dr. Harry Abraham Goodman. He wrote: “I am sure I will not be the only one to call attention to this error by you who are usually so very strict about definition, grammar, punctuation, etc.”

I would be inclined to honor these objections, offering no defense, if I were not in danger of exceeding my quota. One error would certainly not breach it, but it would put me in some danger. I still have a month and a half to go.

I must point out that the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, at almost the very moment in history that the famous clipper ships were being driven from the seas by steamships. Thus, the steam locomotive and the steamship indeed linked the American West with the capitals of Europe, and in a sense created an intercontinental transportation system.

I concede that, strictly speaking, the railroad itself was transcontinental, not intercontinental, but I think it is very unfair for me to be accused of an error on a point as fine as that.

As for the cat, a week after we left the condo, I received a call from its owner. She said, “Did you people find a cat?” (She didn’t say what sex it was.) I said yes, we did, and she said that she knew the local Friends of Animals people and was going to have it “taken care of.”

She didn’t say, however, whether they were going to spay it or castrate it.

By the way, Ms. Anderson, what was my first mistake of the year?