I am sending you a copy of this letter I wrote to [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Herb Caen at the urging of my husband. He says only a man of your intellect and discrimination can truly appreciate all its nuances. –Lisa Wells, Oakland, California
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It’s a classic all right. You spend three pages kvetching to Herb about a grammatical error in his newspaper and in the process make about ten million mistakes yourself. Let me quote a few representative sentences: “As for the rapidly advancing era of illiteracy, sometimes it’s funny to laugh and gaffe about, but other times it feels positively grievous, as though a huge chunk of literary and historical culture is dying. The specific incident which occasioned my writing today is a faux pas in today’s Chronicle. . . . The penultimate paragraph [of a certain story] states that Barbara Jeffers told police ‘her son had been acting strangely recently and had threatened her safety.’ I doubt very seriously that an agitated, frightened mother literally used the words ‘acting strangely.’ The only time I ever hear that expression, aside from newscasters in their embarrassingly misguided attempts to be ‘correct,’ is reverberating around my brain after reading it in the paper–oftentimes, I’m sorry to say, the Chronicle.”
