A line by English poet Alexander Pope has long impressed me: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
    I entered the computer-Internet crowd with some trepidation, wondering what advantage computers held over electric typewriters. At the time, the early ‘90s, my colleague Bruce Papier raved about the infinite possibilities of the Internet. He often bought programs for his computers and passed on to me several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias that came bundled with the purchases.

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    “Keep backing up, Dad. You’ve got at least three meters to go.”
    “But Adam, I can’t think metric! How close am I — really?”
    Thus went a terse dialogue a quarter-century ago, when our oldest son was telling me how much real estate I had to back up the pickup for dumping trash, before falling off a precipice at least a kilometer deep. Clearly he was doing only as he learned from math teachers at Memorial Middle School.
    But those of us who grew up using English units are dia-metric-ally opposed to anything new.

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    It’s 2:17 a.m.; I’m sitting on my front porch with my laptop, watching the rain cascade over the eaves troughs and rain spill into the barrel we bought for harvesting rainfall. This rain, only one of dozens in the monsoons of July and August, could have filled millions of barrels.
    What I first thought was a roaring jet engine was really another of a series of rainfalls that awoke me and probably most of San Miguel County this week.
    So much moisture have we had to date that only recently did a state religious group almost take credit for having prayed too hard for moisture.
    They’re considering sending a thanks-but-we’re-fine-for-now-type prayer this time.

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    Last Saturday I ran in to a gentleman I used to work with before I retired from Highlands in 1999.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked.
    Shifting the emphasis, I answered his question with another, “What are you doing here?” But before anyone gets the idea my ex-colleague and I came across each other in a brothel or an adults-only video parlor, let me explain.

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    Dear Abby, the iconic giver of advice to the lovelorn (whose column has been taken over by a daughter), often was w-r-o-n-g on the advice she gave and especially in the selection of letters she published.
    I’ll get to the one brilliant thought she imparted in a few paragraphs; meanwhile, how has she missed the mark? Let me count the ways:

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    “He’s not a mechanic, he’s just a parts changer.” It was more than a half-century ago that my dad made that assessment.
    Now, in the year 2006, when computer technology has obviated much of the demand for mechanics, my dad’s statement seems prophetic.
    Let me explain:

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    I hit a man in the eye. Not really. I just used the sentence as a way of demonstrating how adverbs such as “only” get to move around in sentences and thus provide us with a host of interpretations.
    In my class at the United World College a few years back, I wrote down that sentence and asked students to place the word “only” in different positions.
    Like this:

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    One expression that keeps making the rounds — usually because someone in print or on television uses it — is “the lion’s share.”
    We’ve even used it here, at the Optic, this bastion of correctiquette. Recently we used it to mean the largest part, the greater portion, as in “the chamber got the lion’s share of the funds.” Invariably, some groups and organizations are left grumbling because they only got a mouse’s share.

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    We kept our grandson, my namesake, for a few days last week, and the visit reminded me of the world around me when I was around his age.
    Wanting to please his grandparents, Arthur asks permission to play, say, across the field. Permission granted, just check in every hour. Instead, he checks in every half hour, “just so you won’t worry.”
    By contrast, a constant playmate of his simply shows up at our house. She’s no trouble at all — in fact Arthur looks forward to her visits — but her mother, I suspect, makes a dozen calls when night falls to find out whose house she’s been visiting.

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    It happened again. A victim of my own upbringing, I corrected my wife’s grammar once too often. Those of you who may know her also know how egregious this offense can be (on my part).
    You see, I grew up in a family whose father wasn’t given to small talk.
    I could get his attention, so it seemed, only by butchering the English or Spanish language. No matter how preoccupied Dad might have been, the slightest slip resulted in a repeat-after-me type lecture.

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