I just met some new-to-me people in a new-to-me organization. I was invited to join WEN for breakfast and it was an enjoyable experience. You know what the little girl said: A stranger is a friend I haven't met yet." (I actually doubt a little girl said that; it's far too profound.) WEN is the acronym for the Writers and Editors Network. I didn't see it written so I don't know if there is an apostrophe on W and E. Someone will tell me. They're all compulsive, like me, not to say anal retentive, about correct grammar. Also very careful. I threw some of my pet peeves at my table companions and they were very slow to answer. (I neglected to hand them a blue pencil.) Here are my questions, already familiar to some bloggers: lie versus lay? may or might? would and should? career/careen?

I find myself incapable of seeing, reading, hearing anything without automatically editing/correcting it, even songs. You know the love song from Camelot, by Lerner and Loewe: "If ever I would leave you". I can't hear it without wincing. "If ever I SHOULD leave you" is, of course, the correct form of the conditional verb. Well, we have to forgive Lerner. Apparently he took a long time slaving over his lyrics., and that's not the only mistake he ever made. I quote something from his biography (on Google);

In a 1979 interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Lerner went into some depth about his lyrics for My Fair Lady. Professor Henry Higgins sings, "Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters / Condemned by every syllable she utters / By right she should be taken out and hung / For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." Lerner said he knew the lyric used incorrect grammar for the sake of a rhyme. He was later approached about it by another famous lyricist:

"I thought, oh well, maybe nobody will notice it, but not at all. Two nights after it opened, I ran into Noël Coward in a restaurant, and he walked over and he said, "Dear boy, it is hanged, not hung." I said, "Oh, Noel, I know it, I know it! You know, shut up!" So, and there's another, "Than to ever let a woman in my life." It should be, "as to ever let a woman in my life," but it just didn't sing well."

Me again: well, "to ever let" is splitting an infinitive. This is a whole new area of exploration. More anon.

I'm not talking about a golf instrument used for getting the ball into the hole. I'm talking about my/your daily activity when you're not really working but puttering at things that have to be done. Like this morning, I put Drano in the kitchen drain, rinsed out my Icelandic coffee bag, and made fresh coffee, pouring old coffee in the geraniums , watered a new primrose brought to me as a gift yesterday (lovely!), filled my humidifier tank, and I forget what else. Not important, but inevitably time-consuming, just puttering, but it has to be done. It's still only 8:15, and I've had my swim, so I have time.

That has made me think of Lillian Gilbreth and Management in the Home. The older among you may remember "Cheaper by the Dozen," the Gilbreths' personal story, made into a movie a couple of times (the first one was with Clifton Webb, not sure who was in the remake, might have been Steve Martin?). The Gilbreths were a husband and wife team, industrial engineers who analyzed time-motion studies to develop more efficient, time-saving methods of production. They applied what they did to their personal management of a large family. They coined the word "therblig" (Gilbreth spelled backwards) to identify a time-motion gesture. How many therbligs does it take to make a pot of coffee? And then - how can you reduce the number of therbligs required? The best solution is to keep your essential tools at the point of first use. Obviously this approach applies very well to household management.

The Gilbreths' domestic book, Management in the Home, is still in print, in a revised and enlarged edition. It was first published in 1954, the year my first child was born. Six years later I had four children, the last one brain-damaged and requiring a lot of extra care, and I still wanted to write - in my so-called spare time. So I bought the book, still have it, still consult it, and set up my work habits, particularly in the kitchen so that I could find enough time and energy left over from housewifery to be able to write.

All the efficiency and techie tools and therbligs in the world won't make me a better writer, but they give me a fighting chance, with enough energy and time to try to improve.

Use your therbligs well!