It’s raining so hard that leaves fall from the trees. The temperature is in the mid-range that comes in early autumn and early spring. Is it autumn or spring?
Seeing the leaves fall reminds me of the sometimes murky rules of style. For example, in English, there is never a space between a word and a punctuation mark. In French, that’s not the case. Depending on the punctuation mark and its location in a sentence, a space may be required before the mark. Working in English and French, I sometimes forget I’ve set the default language in Word to French. Then I type, for example, a question in English and see that a space is automatically added after the last word in a sentence before the question mark. Those chastising double blue lines appear, indicating an error. I wonder about this for a few seconds, then realize the default language needs resetting. When I go to the menu in Word to do that, I find what I suspected: the default language was set to French. So I change the default to English, which makes the lines disappear. Of course, the space did not interfere with my understanding the question, it just interrupted the flow of my reading with a question mark in my head about the question mark.
This kind of dissonance is exactly what many rules in language—editors and other language professionals call them usage or style questions—try to anticipate and resolve through a common and accepted set of guidelines. These guidelines represent a protocol. Not everyone shares the same set of guidelines. Sometimes an editor will follow more than one protocol at the same time. This variety in style is built into the very library of style guides—one field may rely on The Chicago Manual of Style, another on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association—and in all fields any one organization may have its own inhouse style sheet for exceptions to the guidelines that they use instead of certain rules in the guidelines. Some people like the serial, or Oxford, comma, and some don’t. And those preferences are both fine. There’s a case to be made for each, and both styles work. Style preferences exist in other languages, also; I’ve experienced this with Spanish and French, to name two.
And that brings me back to the falling leaves. Sitting at the kitchen table this morning drinking my coffee, confined to my home during the COVID-19 pandemic, where it sometimes feels five degrees colder than it is outside, the falling leaves could as easily signal the coming fall as the coming spring. But either way I was watching a show of choreographed falling leaves, of wind and water and trees. I didn’t need to know the season to feel the beauty.
