It's All Well and Good

My mom was a word freak so that explains how I got this way. Like when I was playing poker with Izzy Gonyet, the relentless debater. Izzy snookered me real cute on a hand and tricked me into paying him off. I said, “Nice hand. You play good."

Izzy’s reply jerked me back to childhood, to nuns and rulers and pain. “You are incorrect,” he said. “I do not play good. I play well.”

I'm like, dude, get a clue. I suppose next you’re going to tell me that "running bad" should be "running badly." And that, "I play loose and you play tight,” should be, "I play loosely and you play tightly.”

He said, “Yes, that is how it should be, in proper English.”

I prayed to mother's soul for the strength to drop it. That's like calling on Attila the Hun to negotiate.

So there I was — trained to know grammar rules and how to break them like how Neil Young breaks guitar strings, about to defend our collective authority to talk off-key. Why? Because on the river of life, my raft has no oars. And Izzy Gonyet was still there, on a chosen course, steering into me.

That’s how Izzy is. He is the nit in nitpicker. He has Izzy tizzies. You should see him when something barely goes wrong at the table. He calls the floorman and brings out his boomy voice and pretends he’s testifying for the Supreme Court. Or when he orders a glass of water and the waitress forgets to, heck, what’s it matter? You got the picture. Izzy is a treasure. Naturally, I wanted to bury him.

I told Izzy that language is like a lake; it appears unchanging on the surface, but new water flows in while old usage evaporates.

I told him that when a poker player says “You play good,” that is not merely English, it’s poker. And that poker-talk is cool because it sounds like something from a slow-moving, cigar-smoking Texan, like when we say that the deck hit a guy in the face and he got broke anyway.

“Hey Izzy, is ‘rubberneck’ a word?”

“Yes it is,” he said, “because it is in the dictionary.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what about what you did after the last hand? ‘Slowroll.’ Is that in the dictionary? Or how about the ‘floplag’ you’re always moaning about? Izzy, you are guilty of using words that Webster will never even hear. Shame shame.”

Izzy squirmed and conceded that some words are okay even if they are not in the dictionary, but phrases should always be spoken and written correctly. “Besides,” he said, “Floplag is a made-up word.”

“But Izzy, aren’t all words made-up?”

That stopped him cold so I turned up the heat. “You want phrases? Let’s talk about what you said after Joe won four racks. You said, ‘He's got game.’ Please do defend the grammar of that phrase. Or how about what you said after Bill went busted? You said, ‘He came off his cheese.’ He did what to his what?”

Izzy was out of outs. So he did the sidestep and reminded me that we were initially talking about the misuse of the adjective “good” in place of the adverb “well.”

“Well,” I said, “It’s good that you brought that up. When it comes to ‘well’ and ‘good,’ we’ll never agree that it’s all well and good, so let’s be good and leave it well enough alone.”