My slip's been showing

Well. Today's the day that I've lost all faith in my disordered compulsive obsessiveness. How can it be that I did not notice that cultivar names take single, not double, quotes? I'm wired to notice these things, ever since cutting my teeth on the requirements of military correspondence as a clerk-typist (back when Custer was a corporal), and (if we are living in a material world, then) I am a Turabian girl. So, hundreds of gardening books and articles read and re-read, with thousands of cultivar names to boot, and it's only today, reading Tony Avent's latest column in Horticulture, that the light bulb is forcibly flicked on for me: "As horticulturists began to make selections of species and hybrids between species, taxonomists was the need for a third name called a cultivar (short for cultivated variety), which is always capitalized and written within single quotes" (emphasis added). Time to clean up this particular errant usage all over this blog...and time to up my dosage of perfectionist pills. Sigh.

Update, June 13, 2004: Kathy gently points out that the quote above should read "taxonomists saw", not "taxonomists was". I'm relieved to say that I find the idea of a typo in this post absolutely hilarious...first step toward mental health, no?

Update, June 23, 2004: And it seems there's a name for the aforementioned phenomenon: "Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation": "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror" [sic]. (Hmm, should the "[sic]" have gone inside the quotation marks? Girlfriend, get a life.)

Comments

[avril]

I'm confused~it looks like you did just that with 'Richard Carvel' so what's the problem? Either way, I'm sure the flowers don't care. Gardening is where I let all my neurotic tendencies fall away....most of the time!

[Chan S.]

I scrubbed the typos on all the entries, leaving only this post as the permanent memorial of spinach-on-tooth. But you are so right--the flowers don't care, and the great thing about the garden is that the rewards are greater when you just relax a little and let things happen...a lesson I can't learn often enough.

[Kathy]

And don't forget--even though God is in the details, he's more than just the details. He's also Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, and Self-Control (among other things). I like to think of the desire for perfection as a longing for home, that world to come when everything will be perfect, effortlessly perfect, because Sin will have died, and God Himself will be our light.

And, by the way, you flipped the word "saw" and made it "was" in that Avent quote.

[Chan S.]

Kathy, that's beautiful and wise and absolutely right...thank you. I'm getting slightly better at being more amused than exasperated at my "human" moments (I'd say the ratio at the time of writing this post was about 50/50), and I'm just rolling on the floor at the typo on the Avent quote (this is progress!). Such grace (in every sense of the word) in your words...I'll try to remember them and smile instead of gnashing teeth at my footfaults in the future.