It's My Blog, so . . .

As I thought about those words and phrases I began writing yesterday--about love, its ins and outs--I sang through a very old song, "Everything I Have Is Yours," (Billy Ekstine sang it in the 1940s). 

In the song is this line "I'd be happy just to spend my life waiting at your beck and call." And I knew it was beck and call, not beckon call, but I wanted to know where that phrase came from, so I googled it. From Phrase Finder I learned that it began in England in the 14th century and means to be totally subservient to someone. 

"Beck" is a word. It is not a word we use anymore, except in the phrase I'm talking about: beck and call. Beck is not the same as "beckon," which means to silently call or signal someone to come. However, we sometimes say or spell things wrong. You know that. And some folks think the phrase is "beckon call." It's not. 

And here I quote from Phrase Finder:

Just because 'beckon call' is based on a mishearing doesn't mean that it won't one day become accepted as proper English. Other phrases, like 'beg the question' for instance, are routinely used incorrectly by so many people that the incorrect usage has now become the standard. Let's hope 'beckon call' dies a natural death, not only because it is essentially just a spelling mistake but because its adoption would signal the last gasp of the enjoyable little word 'beck'.

By the way--and this is your friend Carol again--you may notice the single quotation marks and the period outside the mark in the above quotation. 

Or you may not notice, which is more likely, and please don't take offense here.

But I noticed, not because I'm perfect or even wonderful, but just because I notice this stuff. Anyway, the use of punctuation should tell you the article was written in England. I have left off any quotation marks because I can because this is my blog. But mostly to avoid confusion.

And, remember, in America we always put commas and periods inside the quotation marks, whether we're quoting a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a whole paragraph. Or, at least, that's the rule. Which means that in this article we would use double quotation marks where they use single, and we would put the period inside. Get it?