So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

bribe maitre d's, works nearly every time. seriously, if you remember one thing from these notes, it is to bribe maitre d's twenty dollars in order to get at the head of restaurant lines.

FRENCH IN ACTION!