I smiled and invisibly slipped on the pompous grammar hat without realising. I do hate that hat, but there it was, making me look ridiculous again.
"It's technically right, the singular of criteria," I said, "But it's one of those words that doesn't get used very much."
The hat was fitting very nicely.
"Like datum" I went on, eyes half-closed, finger in the air (I imagined). I couldn't resist.
"No-one in their right mind would say 'datum' instead of 'data point'. Sometimes in technical writing we have to favour common use in order to make a thing clearer."
She knew all that. The hat was mansplaining.
"In fact," I said, pontificating, "Clarity is always going to win over grammatical correctness: though it pains me to say it."
It is true: the day we think of grammar and punctuation as rules to be followed rather than tools to make our sentences clear, we've lost our audience, whomever they are. My mind wandered to the Greeks, who'd used 'commas' to tell the actors where to pause in the dialogue - to the semicolons of Gertrude Stein, and the French lessons where we all learned the difference between the imperfect, the pluperfect and the future conditional tenses and wondered why we'd not learned it in English.
"I know!" she said.
"Actually, the more I think about it, clarity is entirely the point of grammar, isn't it?" said I, wonderfully.
She smiled, and then reminded me of the time I got upset in a review meeting when someone chose something that wasn't grammatically correct but was undeniably a lot clearer. Oh yes. That did happen, didn't it.
The pompous grammar hat slipped off my head and went back to its imaginary drawer.
"Lesson learned, I guess," I said, gulping, and turning back to my work. Indeed.
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