Well, good

This morning I was doing Phoebe's hair while she was playing Minecraft and she was prattling on and on about everything:

"Mom! Do you want to look at my house? I decorated it so goodly! I mean well. I decorated it well. Did you know that well and good are the same word, but you can only use them sometimes. You can't say that you do anything goodly. You do things well. Not well-ly, either. Just well. Like, I decorated my house well, you do my hair well. But things can be good, I think. Like this is a good house or this is a good hairstyle. You can't say well hairstyle. It's always good."

*****

Miriam and I are watching The Other Bennet Sister, certainly a pleasant watch (which diverts from Austen quite markedly, is drowning in anachronisms, and seems to be at least a little cloying (according to the linked-to review)—not only because our television seems stuck on "soap opera effect"). I'm reading The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion and this series seems like a lovely companion to that. I'm pretty unconcerned with doing Jane Austen justice or perfectly replicating society as it was during the Regency or Victorian eras. I'm simply happy to enjoy a rather wholesome retreat from the world and both serve that purpose. 

Light, fluffy, uplifting, occasionally quite humorous. 

When Mary is talking with Mr. Sparrow at a ball, he mentions something about "less oysters" and Mary quickly says, "Fewer. It's fewer oysters; not less." Miriam and I just about died laughing. I don't know that this was a joke in the series, per se, but it certainly is an ongoing joke at our house.

We have discussed the distinction between countable and non-countable nouns. 

Less salt. Less water. Less time.

Fewer boxes. Fewer cats. Fewer days. 

But it is still something that trips up the children...and everybody, really. 

Like, you can't have a sign at the grocery store checkout that says, "10 items or less" because...you can't have less items. 

Items are countable, so you would have fewer items. 

And yet we have signs that say "10 items or less."

It doesn't really matter because it's understandable either way (and isn't that the purpose of language—to communicate an idea, whether the grammar is correct or not). And yet, somehow it's still important to learn and understand these rules (that are constantly shifting anyway). 

So at our house the children correct each other anytime anyone says less or fewer. It doesn't even matter if the original statement was correct or not.

If one of the children says, for example, "There were less people there than I expected," someone will shout out "FEWER!" (which is true). 

But if one of the children says, for example, "I wish there was less broth in my bowl," someone will also shout out, "FEWER!" (even though that would be an overcorrection because "less broth" is correct). Or if they say, "I wish I had fewer problems to deal with," someone will shout out "LESS!" (also an incorrect correction).

The result is that we are more confused than ever about this little grammatical rule at our house. On the plus side, we do often take time to consider whether the original or corrected statement is correct so analyze this rule a lot more often than is perhaps normal, so when it comes down to it the children know how to test whether a statement is correct or not. 

*****

I do have to say that I have a soft place in my heart for Mary Bennet. 

When I lived in High River, my Young Women's president (and/or seminary teacher—I can't remember what her calling was at the time of the play, but she was both YW president and seminary teacher for me and thus really had quite an impact in my life) wrote a musical called Skunks and Roses, which was a countrified retelling of Pride and Prejudice. 

I thought it was delightful. And it was so much work on her part—she wrote the entire script, she wrote the songs, she choreographed the dances, she found costumes, built sets, made casting decisions, directed, advertised... She had plenty of helpers, I'm sure, but she did a lot of the work on her own. 

I didn't think much of things at the time, because I was just pleased involved at all. I had recently begun homeschooling because I was having such a terrible time with bullying in middle school and didn't really feel like I fit in anywhere. Though I felt close to the youth at church, but have since learned that—although I remain friends with a few of the youth to this day—I was actually rather unliked by many. 

Or at any rate, I was considered awkward, uncool, untrendy, undesirable. A gangly, bespectacled nerd. 

I was cast as Mary Bennet and was directed to do all sorts of embarrassing things on stage (while the daughter of the YW leader was cast as our charming and beautiful protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet).

Largely I was fine with it because I quite enjoy musicals and acting and understand the importance of the comic relief. 

But you should also know that my brother was cast as Mr. Collins. 

He didn't really mind that either, being perfectly willing to get up on stage to portray a rather insufferable character. But I just think, in retrospect, that it was altogether uncool to have written such obnoxious characters and then cast my brother and I in them (when we both sang and danced on the regular...yet were not cast in singing and dancing roles, which were given to the "cool" kids, who didn't regularly sing and dance...though fun to give them the experience, it also served to inflate their heads regarding their opinions of their looks and personalities; we heard many "type-casting" jokes, which I laughed about along with everybody else, but now that I'm reflecting on these memories I'm thinking, "Hey, wait a minute..." And perhaps this was more innocent on the part of my YW leader, but I think it was perhaps a little less innocent when it came to our peers).

Anyway, while Mary's portrayal as a quirky, self-righteous, untalented, socially awkward nobody is tangentially interesting to the plot of Pride and Prejudice (I suppose), I do appreciate a good redemptive retelling of her character. 

My own good friend Kathy wrote a charming (and redemptive) series about The Secret Life of Mary Bennet and I care about her opinion immensely. She highly recommended The Other Bennet Sister, calling it an absolute must—charming, funny, delightful. 

We could do with less (fewer!) Jane Austen purists in the world, I think.