I did a double-take listening last week when I heard someone announcing she was going to Dick’s Dally. Dick’s Dally? You know, the popular restaurant downtown that prepares deli sandwiches. Each time I’ve gone there I’ve been convinced that they conduct their business with celerity and alacrity. They certainly don’t dally at the deli.

     All of this made me ponder the wonderful variations on language all of us perform. The point came home when Joann Rains, a retired secretary for Judge Jay Harris, added a suggestion to my columns on language. She said something like, “Lately, all we hear is people using Å’that’ for Å’who.'”
     An example she gave was, “I’d like to thank all the people that helped me.”
     As a retired teacher of language and elocution, who put away his grammar book long ago, I explained that references to people need to be who, not that; “that” is for inanimate objects, as in “The book that I gave her is exciting.”
     Joann probably is also aware of occasions when people use “who” when “that” or “which” ought to apply, as in, “I thank the businesses who supported me.”
     But after I stressed my take on that/who, I realized there’s a song from the musical, “Annie Get Your Gun,” called “The Girl That I Marry.” Somehow, “that” appears correct in this restrictive clause. Could it be that “that,” in reference to future, unspecific situations calls for “that” instead of “who” or even “which”?
     Likely, the age-old question of who and whom, causes people to use “that”; that way they don’t have to stop and think. “Who do you trust?” is probably more common than “Whom . . .” My son Ben pounced on my use of the plural “don’t” instead of the singular “doesn’t” in a recent column on “quality” and “uniqueness.” The expression I used was, “ŒQuality’ is one of those words which don’t necessarily denote goodness.” I sent him a several-paragraph explanation but won’t repeat it here, in the hopes some Optic reader will explain why the sentence is correct — or not. Shortly after the completion of President Bush’s physical exam, a reporter wrote something like, “The president said he Å’feels good’ and Å’is ready to go to work.'”
     Now waaiitt a minute. The writer attributes the quoted words to Bush. Would Bush really use “feels” and “is”? Wasn’t he more likely to have said, “I feel good”? Well, few things in language are certain, but I determined that the only way the president would have used those two verbs would be in the context of: “Mawnin’ yall. Ah feels good and Ah’s ready to go to work.” But “mawnin’ yall” borders on southern-speak, which sounds more like something former president Jimmy Carter would have said. But now we’re getting too political.
     Several years ago, at a teacher workshop directed by a man who said he’d spoken no English until he entered school, I noticed him, a holder of a Ph.D. degree in languages, using the word “cumment” for “comment” and “this things” for “these things.”
     Naturally I wondered why. If people replicate sounds of languages near and dear to them, why did this man say “cumment” and “this things”? These vowels certainly are plentiful in the English language. Spanish has only five vowel sounds, whereas English has five vowels but 15 vowel sounds, some performing triple-duty. Why, then, say “cumment” when the vowel in that word doesn’t exist in Spanish? Nor does the vowel in “this.”
     That took me back to second or third grade at Immaculate Conception School, when I must have recited something that incurred the wrath of Sister Mary Ceciliana Gregoriana Della Pina. I can remember her railing me and others over our Spanish accent, which in those days was tantamount to heresy, or Protestantism. She observed this phenomenon when one of us, possibly me, said, “I want to leave a long time.”
     “No, Arthur, it’s not leeeev, but live; you want to live,” she said.
     So the rest of us, who also misused another English vowel when we said “cop of coffee,” quickly got corrected, and eventually — due to overcorrection — some of us stopped using these Spanish vowels we had grown up with. It’s disconcerting when one develops a mental block over a simple vowel and needs to choose, for example, between the vowels in “bit” and “beat.”
     Obstructed vowels, for sure, gave most of us fits, but certain consonant sounds which don’t occur naturally in our native languages can be a problem. Once, in the intermediate grades, my resentment of a slack-jawed troglodyte who had stolen from me became palpable. One of my friends asked me if I had a grudge. My reply was, “No I don’t. In fact, my parents don’t even own a car.”
     Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether our overcorrection, and ultimately the misuse, of various vowels wouldn’t have occurred had our teacher been a wee bit more diplomatic.
     Did she frighten us to the point that we simply avoided the long-e sound in “feel,” “neat,” “reach,” etc., and transformed them to their nearest phonetic counterparts, “fill,” “knit” and “rich” all legitimate English words, but still misused?
     We observed that our non-Spanish-speaking classmates got no better grades than we, and that their English was far from flawless. But their diction was more along the lines of using “ain’t,” “git” and “hisself.”
     Language, with its unpredictability, fascinates me. That’s why I enjoy writing all this columns.