dear Wally 66 here me out

Dear Wally-
You recently wrote a Dear Wally column about getting rid of February. Interesting idea and I liked it except for one big thing. Did you notice the grammatical mistake you made? (‘Here me out…’). It should have been ‘hear me out,’ as I’m sure you know.
-An anonymous 4th grade teacher.

Dear Teach-
Ugggggg. I noticed the mistake only after it was printed. I’ve decided to come clean and publicly ‘own’ this error, to use the current parlance. I will place the error prominently in my bulging portfolio of shortcomings.
But do hear me out before you trot forth the wooden ruler of discipline in search of my knuckles. The expeditious thing to do would be to lay the blame at the paper’s editor’s feet. Would that it were that easy . For better or worse, the Blue Stone Press has a hands-off approach with respect to the content of my column, which is damn near priceless for a writer, and I love them for it. That means, however, they give me enough rope to hang myself. And in this grammatical matter their hands are completely clean. Mine, alas, are not. The time is neigh for me to ‘man up’ (This bizarre ‘man up’ phrase was nowhere in our vernacular even a year ago. Now it’s almost on the Starbucks drive-though menu).
As is said in Washington, using the blame-shifting, sanctimonious passive voice, mistakes were made.
And in this case, I made them.
And as is also said in Washington, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
This is also true.
A mistake like ‘hear vs here’ is the stuff that stops kids from getting out of 4th grade—IF the author doesn’t know the difference.
I do. The public school system hasn’t failed me. Fear not.
Sometimes when I type, I get caught up in what I’m thinking and gets sloppy. (see? Just like that!) I know what I mean to write and it’s just close enough to fake the brain out when my eye goes back to proofread. Plus my pudgy fingers just squash around the keyboard- you try typing with a watermelon…)
Once it is written down, there’s a certain gooey myopticism that sets in and, in grammatical ways, it becomes impossible to see the forest for the trees. Mistakes are easily camouflaged in an onscreen thicket of pixilation. It’s hard to explain this to the red pen wielding 4th grade teacher without sounding evasive or oleaginous.
I’d like to offer this 3 minute exercise to reinforce my point before you make me see you after class.
Take a piece of paper and a pen. Have a friend in the teacher’s lounge note the time. Write each of the 50 states by name or abbreviation down in a list. When the three minutes are up, count your list. It wont be 50. Guaranteed. Need more time? Fine, give yourself another 3 minutes. It wont help. You will be unable to think of the missing states. Not because you don’t know them, of course, but because of the very congestive cognitive process that is conspiring to make me look like an idiot with basic English usage like here vs hear. It’s a sort of tunnel vision. I blame the medulla oblongatta deep in the cerebral cortex. I blame Monica Lewinsky.
My harsh punishment for this transgression is that my sloppiness has been indelibly recorded in black and white newsprint to the snickering amusement of my peers and critics, ad infinitum… Future generations of Wallys, in whatever form they take, (short? hairless? quadrapeds?) will walk (or jet pack or scurry) the world knowing their primogenitor was a bit sloppy, among other things. It will be a trudge of humiliation, for sure, but hopefully they will neither be irreparably shunned by the rest of society nor ostracized by their peers (nor eaten by giant cockroaches).
Meanwhile back in the here and now, as I munch on a lemon rind, I wince and repent. I will try to be more careful in my editing process, teach, but fundamentally, I’m a little lazy about these kinds of details. There. I said it.
Now, get off my back and I’ll send over an apple for this mistake and then a case of apples for the mistakes I promise are coming in future Dear Wally installments.
And hey, thanks for reading the column so carefully.
Just for fun, right here, I’m gonna dangle a preposition for you to gnaw on!
-No Wally Left Behind

Got a question or correction for our advice columnist or just need him to carefully support your dangling prepositions? Email him at cwn4@aol.com
Ps: I love an America where I can write an entire column on the subject of one poorly chosen word from an earlier column. Now on your list of states don’t forget Delaware!!