I should have known to shut up when my instincts told me to do so. Instead, I acted like an idiot by arguing with my wife over what constitutes a run-on sentence. I said, “I’ve been teaching for over twenty years. I think I know a run-on when I see one.”
“That’s not how they teach it these days, she said. "When was the last time you took a grammar class? You’re old school.”
“The definition of a run-on has remained unchanged,” I said. Then stopping in the middle of my exercise routine, which is something I never do, I picked up Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers from Lara’s bookshelf and referred her to the definition, which states that the two types of run-ons, “fused sentences” and “comma splices,” require two independent clauses. “The student’s conclusion has only one independent clause,” I said. “Therefore, it cannot be a run-on.” But Lara was defiant. She told me to listen to her latest podcast from Dr. Stuart Leidecker, “Grammarian Extraordinaire.” Donning his trademark hobo dreadlocks and well publicized for studying linguistics while living in homeless shelters for two years, Dr. Leidecker was famous for “rewriting the grammar canon” to “make more sense in our ever-changing world” and Lara had gone to one of his symposiums a month or so ago. I was personally skeptical and even hostile toward Leidecker and his brand of “grammar,” but felt I was in a rather precarious situation regarding this alleged run-on sentence. The delicacy of the situation can be more clearly understood when I explain that grammar between Lara and me is a very volatile issue because eight years earlier when we were first dating I used to correct her whenever she started her sentences with the words, “Between you and I . . .” after which I had to explain to her that the object of the preposition between required that she say “Between you and me” as me is the objective pronoun. I made it clear that I was not normally pedantic but that I felt compelled to correct her since she was in the teaching credential program and she would be well advised to protect her credibility through a scrupulous attention to her spoken grammar. The last thing she needed during an open house was for students’ parents to catch her using the incorrect form of pronouns in her speech. However, for the longest time Lara said “Between you and I” presumably to rebel or perhaps to spite me. This problem escalated during the first few years of our marriage and eventually forced us to go into marital counseling, which was not terribly affordable for me at $150 a session. Several months and thousands of dollars later, we got over our little grammar-marital hump. But in the aftermath I had drained my checking account and harbored some residual resentment over squandering so much money over my wife’s refusal to correctly use an objective pronoun.
And now a new grammar briar patch, a disagreement over what constitutes a run-on sentence, had raised its ugly head. Fearful of once again being forced to pay a marital therapist to assuage our grammar disputes, I felt I had better indulge Lara on this run-on sentence business. Giving up my workout for the day, I sat at her desk as she put her headphones over my sweaty ears. I then listened to Dr. Stuart Leidecker’s podcast on run-on sentences. It was his mission, he said, to expand the definition of the run-on to include the “reckless stream-of-consciousness that pervades too much of what passes for writing these days.”
As the unctuous Leidecker lectured on the meandering sentences that were proliferating in our era of e-mail and web chatting, the volume on Julia’s headphones inexplicably surged so that my eardrums roared. It felt as if someone had detonated a firecracker right inside my ears. I remember actually thinking of the word “surge” when the incident occurred because the term had been constantly used in the news and talk radio to describe a different U.S. strategy in Iraq that was supposed to put us “back on the right course.”
Overcome by pain, I cursed and with great drama flung the headphones off my head before throwing myself off the chair and rocking on the floor in the fetal position. Lara was standing over me while asking what the hell had happened.
“Your headphones just surged in my ears. My God, there’s a ringing sensation.”
“Did you hear what Leidecker said about the run-on?”
“Jesus, Lara! I’ve just suffered permanent ear damage and all you can do is continue this stupid debate? I don’t need this right now—not with my book tour and all.”
“Your book tour?”
“Haven’t you been listening to me? My book is currently going through a bidding war.”
“What book?”
What a blow to my ego. For the last week, I had been telling Julia about my book deal, but she was so absorbed in her activities that my imminent publishing success had not put the slightest dent in that brain of hers.
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