Why Ask Why?

Today I enjoyed lunch with two publishing co-workers. C. majored in French, and J. and I were English majors, so we're all fairly math challenged, and it took all three of us to figure out how to work out the tip since lunch ended up being on the house. (We were eating at Bennigan's, which offers a 15-minute lunch challenge; if they don't bring your food in 15 minutes, it's free. It took them 15 minutes and 42 seconds.) And from that we concluded that it's the math people who must know why; it's enough for us language people just to know.

But what led up to all of this was a conversation about why some of us are willing to simply accept a rule or follow a procedure--and that is enough for us. I shared with the two of them a recent incident where I was explaining to a friend a rule of punctuation. When punctuating a possessive noun that is a proper ancient name, like Jesus or Moses, the appropriate punctuation is this: Moses' staff. No extra "s" on the end--that's just how it is. We editors know these things. But more modern names, like James, even though they may end in "s," get an apostrophe, "s": James's giant peach. My friend asked me why this was so. My response was that it didn't matter; that's just how it is. He wanted to know why. He is a math person.

So from there we began to compare notes. J. has been an editor most of her adult life; like me, she's content to know the rules--she doesn't really care why. All three of us agreed: Just tell us the procedure for accomplishing a task on a computer. We really don't even want to know anything more. C. shared with us that she has just recorded in her planner the steps to finding out the percentage of difference between two amounts, a task she has to perform every year at this time. So now she's written down the procedure, giving her a list of steps to follow, so next year she'll be okay.

Please don't mix up numbers and letters for us language people. We like things straightforward and kept in their appropriate places. 2a-3c=x is meaningless. And don't ask us to figure out which train will arrive first when one moves at x number of miles per hour and one moves at y number of miles per hour. Just tell us what time the trains are arriving and departing so we know which one to take. We really don't care about the math that will tell us how fast they're moving and which one will get there first! Life is just too short. . .