When my grandmother cooked liver and onions for my grandfather, the aroma was piquant, the taste repellent.
My family never went in for turnips, but once as an adult I discovered that shredded turnip was a tasty addition to shepherd's pie.
Perhaps you wonder why I intrude on your attention to express a couple of personal tastes of small import. They are not particularly revelatory, they do not inform significantly about food or cookery, and there is no evident reason that anyone should care.
Precisely.
An editors' group on Facebook conducted a lengthy discussion yesterday to determine whether OK or okay is the preferred spelling. It was quickly established that OK is the original spelling, okay a common variant. If a preference is not expressed by a stylebook, individual choice rules.
But people continued to weigh in, expressing personal preferences, until I was grateful for topic drift to carry the thread into discussion of the Oxford dictionaries.
I suppose that all the chiming in can be seen as an effort to establish a consensus or reinforce group solidarity, but it always makes me a little uneasy to see editors freely display purely personal tastes.
When you write, you can be free with your tastes and preferences. You despise moist? Don't use it. You think semicolons are ugly? No one is holding a gun to your head. I like parading my vocabulary in these posts, and irritating readers with my pretentiousness is a risk I choose to take.
But when you edit, idiosyncratic preferences are supposed to be carefully circumscribed. The writer's choices are not to be lightly discarded. (Wolcott Gibbs: "Always respect an author's style, if he is an author and has a style.") In fact, the arbitrary substitution of the editor's preferences for the writer's is precisely what many writers suspect is going on.
Besides, online discussions of words that one likes or dislikes are idle. Occasions will inevitably rise when that word you particularly dislike will be appropriate for occasion, subject, context, and readership; and occasions will rise when you will have to, with regret, discard that word you're particularly fond of.
On Facebook, one reader of yesterday's "stickler checklist" post commented: "Just shows how silly we can be, eh? After all, inflammable doesn't bother me, despite the unnecessary extra syllable. So why get het up over that extra ir? And yet, I do. Maybe it's like liver and turnips. Some folks love 'em; I don't. But they're still food."
Gael Spivak chimed in: "Liver and turnips, John McIntyre. Maybe you need to work that into a blog post."
Then she double-dog dared me to.
So there.