This may be the best thing you read today

JUNE CASAGRANDE

From time to time, a reader may ask me where I learned so much about

grammar. Some may ask whether I was an English major.

And if they listen closely, they just might hear me laughing: a

slightly guilty laugh, the kind that accompanies the thrill of having

pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.

Almost everything I know about English grammar I learned from

French class or from Arabic class or from some book I frantically

tore through to find an answer just moments before I needed the

answer.

I’m no grammarian. I’m a reporter, a perpetual fraud who poses as

an expert on state budgets one day, on water pollution the next and,

every Friday at around 2 p.m., as someone who “knows” English

grammar.

My major was not English but political science and international

relations. Hence the foreign language studies that provided my first

exposure to terms such as “direct object pronoun,” “gerund” and

“subject-verb agreement.”

I doubt I’d have heard much of that in college English classes.

From what I can tell, they’re more prone to words such as “Dickenson”

and “Hemingway.”

As far as high school English classes go, I hear they’re

surprisingly short on grammar, too. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t go. I

dropped out of school without ever completing the ninth grade and,

years later, got a GED to go to college. Why, you might ask? None of

your business.

The first time I ever held a copy of the Associated Press Style

Guide was the night before I had a job interview at Business Wire,

which included a copy-editing test on, you guessed it, Associated

Press Style. I passed.

Now I go through a similarly ridiculous process every Friday

afternoon as deadline for this column looms and I scramble to cop

some instant expertise.

This week’s test came in the form of an e-mail from a fellow Times

Community News staff member who works in another office. He pointed

out how often people confuse the words “may” and “might.”

He might have been referring to my own stories for all I know,

because I’ve always used these two words interchangeably without

question. Of course, that’s wrong. And of course, now my solution is

to scramble over to my stack of books and quickly try to figure out

what’s right.

Here’s what the Chicago Manual of Style dictates: “‘May’ expresses

what is possible, is factual or could be factual ... . ‘Might’

suggests something that is uncertain, hypothetical or contrary to

fact.”

When I stopped scratching my head over this one, I tried to

exercise my flimsy newfound knowledge in the first three sentences of

this column. Looking back at those sentences, I’d give myself a grade

of D at best and suggest you consider Chicago’s examples instead. “I

may have turned off the stove, but I can’t recall doing it,” shows

the correct use of “may.” It’s quite possible I turned the stove off.

“I might have won the marathon if I had entered,” is the way to go

with “might.” Whether I would have won an marathon I never entered is

purely hypothetical.

I might have known that if I had any genuine “expertise.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE covers Newport Beach and John Wayne Airport. She

may be reached at (949) 574-4232 or by e-mail at

[email protected].