Friday, April 29, 2011

If They Thank Me, Their Welcome

I don’t consider myself a lazy man, but I’d rather find a dollar than earn one. It’s not that I don’t value skill and labor. It’s that I value luck even more.

(One of my longest-running fantasies is that I’m a champion chess player, not just world-class but invincible. I literally can’t be beaten. In my fantasy I haven’t really mastered chess strategy or tactics, at least not on any conscious level, and I don’t put much effort into my matches. I know the rules and I pay some small measure of attention to my games and that’s about it. Whenever it’s my turn to move I’m guided mostly or completely by a vague hunch as to my best option. As soon as it becomes my turn I’m ready to move, and because I always make my play so quickly it often seems to spectators (and sometimes to myself) almost as though I were moving pieces randomly. My question is simply “what’s the most advantageous thing I can do right now that’s permitted by the game’s constitutive rules?” and my answer is always and immediately and infallibly provided by my intuition. (Actually, I should probably rephrase that. “Intuition” implies that my instincts are telling me distinctly that a certain move is the best play and that I’m listening to my instincts, and this is not entirely the case in my chess fantasy. It’s more like I’m on autopilot: I extend my hand and I move a piece, I wait while my opponent plays her turn, I extend my hand and I move a piece…and so on until I have won.) Being a famous chess player, a virtual rock star among the intelligentsia, I’m interviewed from time to time and I’m never ashamed to reveal that my perceived genius is but a knack for taking a phenomenal series of extremely lucky and slightly educated guesses. My apparent mastery is only serendipity repeated with unfathomable reliability, and I’m not afraid to tell the world so. Nobody ever believes me anyway. It wouldn’t matter if they did.)

It is for my love of happy flukes that I refuse to pity or scorn those benighted, semiliterate wretches who write “your welcome” when they mean “you’re welcome.”

I think that one could argue with a straight face that “your welcome” is a perfectly legitimate term with which to politely acknowledge thanks. Let’s say that you are the thanking party and I am the welcoming party. I provide you with your welcome by saying/writing “your welcome” just as greeting parties might provide greeted parties with greetings by saying/writing “greetings” (or “salutations” or “greetings and salutations”). Now, of course, I don’t really believe that the ignoramuses who write “your welcome” are ever actually contemplating the possession or ownership of the welcome that they are articulating. Rather, they have stumbled ass-backwards into the lap of good grammar. But I don’t see why I should begrudge them their good fortune.

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