**UPDATE: Scheck out the comments to get the story straight from the source.

As you have seen from my sidebar, I have been reading “Why Do Catholics Do That?” It was a gift after repeated admissions and blatant examples of my ignorance of Catholicism. It’s not an “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” kind of thing, but rather a way for me to have a vaguely intelligent and informed conversation next time I feel the need to nit pick about something. And maybe with a little more knowledge will come more understanding. It’s not going to upend my feelings about religion. I’m not going to start regularly going to church, temple, or anything else, but I expect not to dismiss it. That’s a whole different conversation, however.

This conversation is about discipline.

If there’s one thing I find wholly lacking these days, it is discipline. I see it in spoiled children running amok (okay, my cats running amok too), the bailouts for sub-prime borrowers, the excesses flaunted in so-called reality television, the exploits of celebrities and the reality that we’re paying attention, so-called news on my radio that announces a mass murder with the same tenor and detail as you would a street cleaning notice. I could go on. I won’t.

This complete lack of discipline or consequence weighs on my mind most days since you needn’t do more than exist in a society to see it. However, I really didn’t expect to find it in a book on Catholicism. Now call me crazy−and I’ve only just begun the first chapter so I’m sure I’ll offend here−but it just seems a bit ironic and disappointing that a book on Catholicism would exude laziness amongst its pages. It’s not so much that it’s a book on Catholicism, but that I would consider such a book to be more oriented toward a scholarly work as opposed to, say, a bathroom book. As I am reading it, though, I find the following:

“But it’s got to be willful.”

Oh how it hurt. I had to put down the book and I am reluctant to pick it back up again. “It’s got to be”? Really? This is where your education has taken you? Not even a hint of the word “has”, say, “It has to be”.

Now, if the book weren’t already meandering in these first few pages and it didn’t then have a typo three pages later, I might have forgiven it. But all I could see was the proliferation of error upon error as more and more people publish books that they didn’t take the time or have the discipline to correctly proof and edit. “Good enough” at it’s worst.

Why does the word “got’ set me off? Because it’s a symptom of a larger problem. The problem is laziness. This author didn’t choose, after a basic mastery of grammar, to use the word “got” as opposed to “has”. He didn’t know any better. And he has a fucking PhD. Obviously a product of quantity not quality or else how would this crap get printed?

And that gets me too. This was printed, on paper, and people bought it, they paid money for it, and now, they have a poor excuse for language muddled into their library just waiting for someone to read it and think, “Oh, that’s how it’s done. You use ‘got’, not ‘has’.”

Obviously, the easy assertion here is that my opinion is elitist. It is a means of separating myself from the uneducated, of making myself better. That argument could work if learning grammar was something that was not accessible to all, however it is accessible to anyone willing to learn. I don’t care what school you go to, what neighborhood you live in, if you take your education into your own hands, where it should be, you can learn grammar.

Grammar is a discipline just like Math, Science, or any other subject. You don’t get to do whatever you want until you prove you can do what you are supposed to do. You don’t start getting the “yadda, yadda” answers in Math in elementary school because you haven’t proven your mastery of those skills yet. You get the “yadda, yadda” answers in college when you are calculating the area of intersecting planes in a three dimensional object. At that point, you have the mastery−then comes exploration and experimentation.

The same goes for grammar. If you want to write poems of nonce words without a punctuation mark in sight, that’s fine−wonderful even, but first, let me know that you’re using “got” for a reason.

Think of Picasso. Some of Picasso’s paintings might seem to be nonsense because they lack realism, but he’s allowed because he long ago proved that he had the genius necessary to master realism. He wasn’t some three-year-old throwing green paint at a canvas and calling it a jungle.

What separates Picasso from a boy with sagging diapers? Discipline. What separates legitimate writers from hacks with a computer? Discipline. The thing is, the separation is justified. They worked for something and others didn’t. Work, effort, discipline, and mastery count for something, despite what your mommy and your teachers told you when you “almost had it”. If these things didn’t mean anything, then nothing you could ever do would ever matter because it would have required nothing of you.