OK, So He Errs . . .but It’s Not <i> His</i> Fault

I have boasted that I allow myself only four errors of fact or grammar a year, and so far I believe I have kept that restriction, since I do not count those that I can argue my way out of.

Now, suddenly, I am accused of committing three in one column, and more. In my column about my daughter-in-law Jacqueline being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, readers tell me, I misspelled La Marseillaise as Le Marseillaise . That’s my wife’s fault. As usual, I asked her to edit my column; she corrected my misspelling of Marseillaise, but overlooked the Le instead of La .

More serious is my referring to a bottle of champagne (ordered at a celebratory lunch in Taix Restaurant) as coming from the Loire Valley of France (Jacqueline’s home).

Charles Vorsanger of Pasadena, among others, notes that Champagne comes only from the Champagne district of northeastern France. (Ersatz champagne also comes from several California locales, including Cucamonga.)

I am chastised by attorney Don Sweeney of Santa Barbara for observing that my daughter-in-law had “only a high school education.” Sweeney says he deplores the phrase because “it implies that (high school graduates) have learned little or nothing from the experiences of life. True, some learn little. But Jackie Smith?

“She has adapted to the American culture, navigated a marriage to a Smith, raised a son and a daughter, found a demanding business career and carried it off, and won the admiration of her in-laws (you). She can hardly be intellectually characterized by the number of years she spent in formal schooling.”

It’s worse than that, Sweeney. My daughter-in-law now tells me that she did spend two years at college in France. Oy ve is mir!

Darrell R. Abbott of Marina del Rey takes me to task for using commas in this sentence: “My older son, Curt, and my younger son, Doug.” He notes correctly that there should be no commas. Then he concedes that I later wrote, “our grandsons Chris and Casey, my grandson Trevor and my daughter-in-law Jackie.” Then, he points out, I reverted to the commas again in “My granddaughters, Adriana and Alison.” (That’s what comes of having so many grandchildren.)

Abbott wasn’t through with me. He also pointed out that I erred in writing: “Most of my family gathered at our house for Super Bowl XXIX, my being the paterfamilias when it comes to football.”

“Sorry, Jack, but in this construction, the noun or pronoun preceding being is the subject of that verb (it is a verb, not a verbal noun known as a gerund) and, of course, the nominative case must be employed for subjects. Hence, Jack, you should have written ‘I being,’ not ‘my being.’ ”

That’s not the worst of it, Abbott. Did you notice that I also picked the Chargers to defeat the Forty-Niners?

Dr. Alan S. Greenfield of Northridge writes: “I am a fellow ‘don’t-trash-the-English-language nut’ so you can feel my shock when I read, in your column, the following: ‘If Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone can do it on the screen outside marriage, why not us?’

“Your proofreader should have nailed you. The statement should have been, ‘Why not we?’

“ Us don’t do that kind of thing, and if we are going to do it, given the strength, you should have said we .”

Whom, us?

I thought about using we but then I thought, “You wouldn’t say, ‘Why not I,’ would you?”

It’s always so rewarding to have at least one complaint you can grind into the rug. A reader who identifies himself only as “another 1930s Belmont grad” complains that I misuse the word but by starting a sentence and a paragraph with it.

“One never starts a sentence with but, “ he says, “and even worse is starting a paragraph with but .”

I quote from the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage: “ But may be used to start a sentence, a practice deplored by Victorian grammarians. It may also be used to establish the relationship between two independent sentences: ‘Churchill painted a gloomy picture. But the British people rallied to the challenge.’ ”

I admit I have been pretty sloppy lately, according to my critics. It is not a proud record, my being the paterfamilias of grammar in our family. But my flag still flies.

As I have pointed out, one of my errors was my wife’s fault, and another was charged against me by a Victorian critic, though a fellow alumnus of Belmont High School.

So I was right about but and maybe I was right about “Why not us? “

How many does that leave? You figure.

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Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.