The Candidate's Wife: Primo asks The Challenger why she didn't talk to him before she announced she was running and she says she knew he would try to talk her out of it WHICH IS TRUE

Oh yeah. I meant to post this yesterday.

So not much more to say about this. Primo and The Challenger have become friends. They now speak honestly. And he asked her why she didn't talk to him before announcing, which apparently is comme il faut, but

1. The Challenger is not a party insider and
2. She didn't know the rules and
3. Even if she had known the rules, so what? Who says that we have to abide by unspoken rules made by groups in which we are not participants?

Primo and I argue about that principle a lot. Example - he comes down hard on people who do not speak standard English.

(OK - I know the rules about standard English are not unspoken - just go with it.)

I point out that there is no intrinsic right or wrong about language.

He, the son of a snobbish English professor, insists that there is Right English and Wrong English and One Must Speak Correctly.

I say Right English is whatever is imposed by the dominant culture but that speaking non-standard English does not make someone morally corrupt.

He thinks it makes someone Wrong Wrong Wrong not to speak properly. That's one of the reasons it takes him so long to compose an email or a facebook post - he has to make sure it's perfect.

Clearly, as evidenced by this blog, I do not spend hours copyediting. (Blogger is telling me that I am spelling "copyediting" wrong.)

Language, I tell him, is just dialect with an army.

I finally convinced him.

Well, I didn't. A young woman did.

We saw a play at a local college that an African American student wrote about the African American experience. In it, she talks about how if white people can learn to pronounce names like Pfieffer and Ziegler, we can take a minute to learn how to pronounce African American names.

And - he was convinced.

So I won.

And yes - Primo would have tried to talk The Challenger out of running. She was worried she would have let him convince her. So I am glad she didn't talk to him! I am happy that Primo is out of this game.