Free Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Page A

remember, my father has called every woman who is more than ten years his junior a girl. Since he is now ninety-one, that covers a lot of women. He would never call a man over the age of eighteen a boy. I have tried to persuade him to mend his ways, but the word is ingrained, and he means it gallantly. He truly believes that inside every stout, white-haired woman of eighty there is the glimmer of that fresh and lissome thing, a girl.
    If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown “girl” would probably be transformed by an editor’s pencil into a “woman.” The same thing would happen to E. B. White. In an essay called “The Sea and the Wind That Blows,” White described a small sailing craft as “shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl.”I don’t think he meant a ten-year-old girl. I think he meant a girl old enough to be called a woman. But if he had compared that boat to a woman, his slim little craft, as well as his sentence, would have been forever slowed.
    What I am saying here is very simple: Changing our language to make men and women equal has a cost. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. High prices are attached to many things that are on the whole worth doing. It does mean that the loss of our heedless grace should be mourned, and then accepted with all the civility we can muster, by every writer worth his’er salt.

R /     I N S E ^ T   A  C A R R O T      E /
    D uring a recent visit to the Florida island where our parents live, my brother and I had dinner with them at a fancy restaurant. As we bent our heads over our menus—all of us, that is, except my father, who can’t see—I realized that our identically rapt expressions had nothing to do with deciding what we wanted to eat.
    “They’ve transposed the
e
and the
i
in Madeira sauce,” commented my brother.
    “They’ve made Bel Paese into one word,” I said, “and it’s lowercase.”
    “At least they spell better than the place where we had dinner last Tuesday,” said my mother. “
They
serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck.”
    We stared at one another. You’d think that after all these decades, we Fadimans would have mapped every corner of our deviant tribal identity, but apparently there was one pan-familial gene we had never before diagnosed: we were all compulsive proofreaders.
    Our confessions tumbled onto the tablecloth like so much spilled Madeira sauce. My brother revealed that in a 364-page computer-software manual he had consulted the previous month, he had found several hundred errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax. His favorite was the oftrepeated command to “insert a carrot.” He had written the company, offering to trade a complete list of corrections for an upgraded version of the software, but had not received a reply. “They want to be wrong,” he sighed. I knew that by “they” he meant not just the software company but everyone who was not a Fadiman.
    Our mother confided that for several years she had been filling a large envelope with mistakes she had clipped from her local paper, the
Fort Myers News-Press
, with the intention of mailing them to the editor when they achieved a critical mass.
    My father, who at age twenty-four had been a proofreader—indeed, the entire proofreading department—at Simon & Schuster, admitted that in the full flush of his youthful vanity he had routinely corrected menus at posh Manhattan restaurants and handed them to the maître d’s on his way out. He had even corrected
library books
, embellishing their margins with ¶s and
lc
‘s ands, which he viewed not as defacements but as “improvements.” After he lost his sight three years ago, he had spent an insomniac night trying to figure out what kind of work he might still be capable of doing, and had hatched the following plan: He would spend twelve hours a day in front of the television set, prooflistening for mistakes in grammar and pronunciation. He figured that if he charged five