I Went To The Science Fair, Affect and Effect Were There......

"I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there..." Come on, you know that song. Now, sing today's blog title and you'll see what I was going for. (I can't hear you, so don't worry about being tone deaf.)

Last night, my husband and I went to the Science Fair at our son's school. After cruising through the aisles and viewing hundreds of those display boards (you know, the fancy ones with a large middle section and two smaller side flaps), my husband asked me if I had learned anything.

You have to understand that when he says, "Have you learned anything tonight, Amy?", it is kind of a smart-ass remark. So I smart-assed him right back. (By the way, while dictionary.com has no problem with it, this blog's correction feature does not recognize the term smart-assed, annoyingly underlining the assed part in red dots as I write. It also does not recognize the possessive blog's, as in its f*@#ing correction feature. I guess a blog cannot possess anything. If I am looking for justice in this matter, it seems like now would be a good time to take it to the Supreme Court, even if they are screwing up everything else.)

"Yes, Bob," I said to him, "I have learned that a lot of people use the word effect when they mean affect."

At that point I should have left well enough alone, but the effect vs. affect question seemed like a perfectly good topic of conversation with my son's first pediatrician, another mother at school. We both whipped out our phones and started to look things up, hoping for something decisive. We are still looking for answers. (Okay, she's probably seeing patients while I'm still looking.)

She thought that I might be half right and half wrong. I figured she must be right about that because, after all, she's a doctor which, automatically (in my mind, anyway), makes her smarter than I am. Then I wasn't sure. I went back to feeling that I knew who had used the words correctly and who had not. Her husband put it best when he said he just kind of knows which one to use and when, but he couldn't tell you why. Exactly.

"This is why I decided to become a doctor and not an English major," she said as we were wrapping up our conversation. Well, there's the problem. We didn't have to declare a major at my college. Which is probably why I'm still trying to figure out what to be.

I leave you, for today, with one or two questions. How did not declaring a major affect my path in life? In other words, what effect did it have upon me?