Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Much ado about fussing

The whole time I was driving home last night I was fussing over verbs and adverbs--specifically, whether I used the correct forms in two sentences in yesterday's blog entry. Which is just silly, because the whole point of yesterday's blog entry was to write something in a very limited amount of time so that I wouldn't be able to fuss over it, and there I was fussing over it during what should have been a relaxing drive. Here are the sentences that bothered and continue to bother me:

What can I say in 10 minutes--or slightly less?
Isn't 185,000 enough?

The common problem is the use of numbers. Am I talking about 10 individual minutes or a 10-minute span? Do I refer to 185,000 individual miles or a unit of mileage? It makes a difference. If I'm talking about individual, countable minutes, then I ought to write "fewer" instead of less, but clearly my mind at the time was thinking of 10 minutes as one unit of time and not ten of them.

That sentence doesn't bother me, though, as much as the second, which went through uncounted permutations in my mind during the drive home:

Isn't 185,000 a large enough pile of miles?
Aren't 185,000 miles enough?
185,000 miles is far enough, isn't it?
185,000 miles are enough, aren't they?

It's useless: no matter how many times I try, I can't make it sound right. This is where a really insightful editor would be helpful. Someone asked me recently how I can justify criticizing writing in, for instance, the New Yorker when my own prose is far from perfect. "Simple," I said. "Their prose has a horde of fact-checkers and editors fussing over it; mine doesn't." But, as yesterday's experience demosntrates, that doesn't mean my prose doesn't get fussed over.

Now I've got another entry to worry about. How much should I fuss over my overuse of the verb "fuss"?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Simple," I said. "Their prose has a horde of fact-checkers and editors fussing over it; mine doesn't." But, as yesterday's experience *demosntrates*, that doesn't mean my prose doesn't get fussed over.

QED

Anonymous said...

Agreed with the partisan above; perhaps "fuss" is not the verb that should worry you. =)