I was cutting the grass this morning, pushing the mower across the yard, turning, and pushing it back in the opposite direction, when boustrophedon popped into my head.

It is an excellent word from the Greek, from bous, “ox,” and strophos, “turning,” and it describes my motion with the mower. It’s the same pattern a farmer would follow in plowing a field with an ox, first in one direction, then back in the other.

It was common in the ancient world for texts to be written boustrophedon, lines alternating left to right and right to left.

Over the years I’ve assembled a number of quotations on writing, editing, and grammar. From this selection, pick what would be most helpful to you if you look up from your desk to it.

“No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar if grammarians discuss them.”

                —  Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton

 “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

                  — T.S. Eliot

“Always respect an author’s style, if he is an author and has a style.”

Last week at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, Paula Froke, editor of the Associated Press Stylebook, asked a question during the announcement of new stylebook entries:

“John McIntyre, what’s the stupidest rule in the AP Stylebook?”

“The split-verb entry,” I answered.

“No longer,” she said.

“YES!” I shouted, thrusting my fist into the air.

Those of you who are unaccountably unacquainted with my years-long trench war against this idiotic bogus rule may require an explanation.

Great Fowler’s ghost! That it should have come to this. I am defending the Associated Press Stylebook.

The editors posted an ad at Facebook about changed entries that have been introduced in recent years, asking, “Are you using the latest AP style guidance?” They should have known better.

At the top of the comments are more than a dozen whingeing about the decision to drop the over/more than distinction.

I’m sitting in the bar, enjoying a quiet pint of Smithwick’s, when this nimrod wearing a red Make America Grammatical Again cap comes through the door and sits down on the stool next to me.

“I’ll have a lite beer,” he tells the bartender.

Figures, I think.

“What’s your game?” he turns and asked me.

“Mainly annoying people online. Used to be an editor at a newspaper, until the bottom fell out of the paragraph scam.”

He gives me a look like a copy editor checking his buyout eligibility. “Bunch of kids who can’t write English,” he says.

Today, God help me, I’m writing about baseball.

My esteemed colleague Dan Rodricks has forwarded an email complaint about a reference to the Orioles in a front-page headline as the “O’s.”

Under the heading “Not a possessive,” the complaint: “I have always disliked the notion of the ‘Os.’ To me, raised on Chuck Thompson, the team is known as the Birds. I know the team perpetrates this and also uses the unnecessary apostrophe. I wish the Sun would set it straight.

With National Grammar Day (March Fourth) approaching, I had made no plans to write a Grammarnoir episode this year, but this morning I have been challenged on Facebook to produce one.

I make no promises. But I am offering one potential initial sentence. If it looks promising to you, how about you make suggestions about the plot, either publicly or privately.

I was sitting at the bar enjoying a quiet pint of Smithwick’s when this nimrod came through the door wearing a Make America Grammatical Again cap and sat down on the stool next to me.

In writing about writers’ and editors’ crotchets, Benjamin Dreyer praises “the bracingly peeve-dismantling Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage." If bracing writing about language appeals to you, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (Random House, 291 pages, $25) is the book for you.

And if you do not care for bracing writing about language, what in God’s name is the matter with you?

Mr.