Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn’t aware that saying things like, “Hopefully, it won’t rain this weekend” has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. “Hopefully” is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner. For decades, however, the word has also been a common shorthand for “I hope.”

Those of us who work with words grapple daily with the issue of where we slide and where we take a hard line. I die a little every time I see a “gonna” or “gotta,” and I’ll jump through linguistic hoops to avoid using “they” or “their” for the singular when the gender isn’t specified. There’s nothing like a note – from a teacher, for God’s sake – commanding that “Every child should bring their lunch” to make me want to switch exclusively to Latin. Yet I’m lax about ending sentences with a preposition, treat phrases like sentences for dramatic effect and use “rapey” and “stabby” and other made-up words on a regular basis. And I start half my sentences with conjunctions.

If I take no umbrage with creative punctuation and fanciful adjectives, why am I so distraught over the acceptance of a word already commonly accepted? Why, when I once had an editor insert a “hopefully” in one of my stories, did I react with such shock and horror? Why do I groan when someone says “hysterical” when they mean “hilarious” or “nauseous” instead of “nauseated,” even though I know I’m being far more conservative than even modern grammarians? They’re such small things, after all, little deaths in a world where text and email increasingly make written communication look like old Prince lyrics.

Language is meant to be subverted. (Note bold use of passive voice!) Geniuses like Joyce, Eliot and Cummings didn’t need any stinkin’ AP Stylebook to tell them what to do. The rest of us take what works and is effective and leave the rest, like Cafeteria Catholics of the Elements of Style. But there’s a difference between bending the rules and flat-out sloppiness. There’s a distinction between a layperson willfully playing with language and the guys who are supposed to be in charge throwing in the towel.

That’s what kills about this. It’s the way Associated Press deputy standards editor David Minthorn told the Washington Post Wednesday, “We batted this around, as we do a lot of things, and it just seemed like a logical thing to change. We’re realists over at the AP. You just can’t fight it.” The AP Stylebook can’t fight it? The AP Stylebook? What hope is there, then? First they came for “hopefully” and we said nothing. Who will stand up when they come for “literally”? Who will speak out when someone writes the next “between you and I”? When modifiers dangle, who will smack them back into place?

Writing in the Baltimore Sun,  John E. McIntyre crows this week over this new triumph over “the tribe of Harrumphers” and insists, “Vogue usages tend to irritate purists, because they are popular with the Wrong People.” I don’t think that’s it. Maybe for some, the outrage over the new official recognition of “hopefully” is mere snobbery, but I suspect it’s simple grief for grammar in general and its degradation in classrooms and newsrooms. There’s a sense that rules are no longer being bent; they’re never being learned in the first place. I want an AP Stylebook that I can flout, not one that throws up its hands because nobody cares about it any longer anyway. Language keeps evolving, and that’s fine and natural. Yet as it does, I’ll still gaze hopefully toward a world in which we battle over our words and our rules because we know them so well, and love them so much.

The thing is, when it comes to accents, the way we perceive them has little to do with the way people actually talk, and everything to do with our prejudices. Italian accents sound sensual because we think of Italians as sensual. German accents sound brusque because we think Germans are cold and calculating.  And, for the longest time, all Americans sounded to me like aggressive jerks.

When I was younger — and living in Edmonton, a frozen city in Western Canada with the world’s largest cowboy boot — family and friends spoke disdainfully about America, and their lack of politeness and deference. They resented the “brain drain”; that so many Canadian professionals were being lured south of the border by big paychecks and prestigious jobs. And I had been repeatedly told about the many ways that America had mistreated Canada over the course of history, from the war of 1812 to NAFTA.

Based on Idaho news reports that were beamed across the border, America seemed like a more dangerous version of home, with a lot more chain restaurants and less firearm safety. I didn’t understand why Canadians would want to move to America. Canada had universal healthcare, and safe cities and an enormous sculpture of a pyrogy on a fork. All anybody seemed to do in Idaho was get shot in a TGI Fridays.

After college, I worked on Canadian TV shows and in strange service jobs in Toronto. I considered opening up a video store with a friend. And then I came across a graduate program in, of all places, New York City. I had been to New York a couple of times as a teenager, and found it both fascinating and unnecessarily pushy. I had traumatic memories of a woman yelling at me when I accidentally touched her purse in a grocery store. I couldn’t imagine myself fitting in there and yet, the graduate program sounded perfect. So I applied, and to my surprise, I got in. I convinced myself that if I went I wouldn’t be a real traitor — it would only be for two years, then I’d move back to Toronto. And I wasn’t going to let America change who I was.

My accent was one of my key forms of resistance, and I started to exaggerate it. I would cartoonishly draw out my “oot” sounds when I met strangers, and I started punctuating my sentences with “eh,” something I had never done before, but everybody seemed to think I should do, since they had seen Canadians do it in movies. My accent became a parody of what it was supposed to sound like, or what I sounded like back home. I was like a German speaker imitating the cast of “Fargo.” A stranger I met in an airport asked me if I came from Alabama, because I sounded “so Southern and proper.” Someone else thought I was South African.

My two-year anniversary in New York came and went, and somehow, I ended up staying. After finishing school, I found a job, and a work visa, and then another one. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but it made sense, and my feelings about New York began to shift. I began to see those trademark American qualities from a new perspective. It wasn’t that New Yorkers were aggressive or insensitive, they were assertive. They could ask for what they wanted. They weren’t self-entitled so much as self-confident. They got things done.

And I started to want those qualities for myself. Now I would complain if my waiter got my order wrong, instead of eating whatever meal he brought me. I started standing my ground against my landlord. I would fight for a place in a crowded subway instead of getting pushed out. At one point, some Swedish tourists were blocking the doors of the subway at my stop. “Excuse me,” I said, without any success. “Get out of my way!” I said again. When that didn’t work, I yelled, “Get the fuck out of the way!” They scattered.

As I left that subway car, I was in shock: Did I really just swear at a group of middle-aged Swedes? Something had fundamentally changed — I wasn’t a polite Canadian anymore. I was something else: An asshole, maybe, but also mostly an impatient New Yorker. I felt like a new, assertive person. And, as time went by, I stopped noticing the fact that Americans spoke differently than me. The jokes about my accent dwindled. Despite my best intentions, I started to belong.

A few weeks ago, my friend Steve came to visit New York for the first time. We had grown up together in Edmonton, and we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Midway through our dinner, he said, “Thomas, you sound like an American. I can’t hear your Canadian accent anymore. On top of that, you speak so much more aggressively. It’s like you’re always yelling.”

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!” I screamed.

Over the last five years, my accent’s makeover has mirrored my own transformation from shy, deferential Canadian into a moderately assertive American. I suppose it’s a very mild version of what other immigrants go through upon their arrival in the United States — the thousands of non-English speakers who face culture shock and widespread discrimination every year — but it proves that whenever we arrive in a foreign place, we all have to figure out who we are and what we want to be. Our prejudices shatter and shift. It’s not a sign of weakness — it’s a sign of growth.

When I visit home, I may no longer sound like the person I expected I would be. I sound like the person I am. And that’s just fine with me.

Coming out of an exercise class recently, a guy turned to one of my friends, sweating and breathless, and heaved a sigh of satisfied exhaustion. “Wow, that was just like being raped, wasn’t it?” he said. My friend stood motionless, blinking back at him.

I sat motionless, blinking back at my computer screen after reading that.

Rape isn’t just casually used as a synonym for nightmarish experiences — it’s also relied on as an easy punch line. A few months back, I found myself co-judging a San Francisco literary competition, an event less focused on books than, you know, boozy good times (hence my being qualified to judge, wah-wah). One of the performers, a dude, read a humor piece that used a male rape scene as a comedic climax, so to speak. When it came time to evaluate the performance, a fellow female judge and I were like: Dude, making fun of male rape is lame. That mild statement got us booed.

Some people really love their rape jokes! I can understand, in a way. Hyperbole and political incorrectness are among comedians’ favorite tricks. Make someone squirm and you just might also make them laugh. It’s also true that language is fluid and there’s a legitimate place for dramatic wordplay. Even if you don’t consider rape to be comedic gold or a useful synonym, there is still a reasonable argument against censorship. But I have no interest in unilaterally policing language and personal expression. I do, however, reserve the right to pass judgment about how other people use language. So, go forth, express yourselves freely — but maybe first consider what anti-rape activist Sandy Brindley tells the Guardian: “Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there’s something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women’s lives.”

But even the mere suggestion of profanity is enough to set concerned viewers reaching for the smelling salts and threatening to boycott the show’s advertisers. On Monday, the Parents Television Council informed the world that CBS is “on notice,” stating, “Unless or until CBS chooses a different title for this program, we are urging advertisers to avoid sponsoring such an abomination purported to be lighthearted fun.” Bitch, please.

As James Poniewozik observed in his Time blog Wednesday, the outrage seems to be having less effect on advertisers than the apparent banality of the show itself.  He further astutely points out that the concern isn’t entirely baseless — and separating adult- and child-friendly content is unenviably challenging when it comes to the title of a show or a movie, as last spring’s tap dancing around “Kick-Ass” proved.  

I don’t think life has to be one big potty-mouthed free for all, even if my own frequently resembles a Mamet play directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring a cast of Teamsters who’ve just stubbed their toes. The nuances of audience and intention are key. A person’s ears and eyes – and those of that person’s children – are entitled to the courtesy of reasonable moderation. Yet when I see Dollar Sign Hashtag Asterisk Exclamation Point My Dad Says, I do not think, you haven’t sufficiently protected my family from this “abomination,” CBS! My main concern for my children is that now I have to explain the damn reasoning behind it. Sorry, kids, some people are offended by certain words, so they came up with this bullshit way of symbolizing it without saying it. Which is how my kids wind up learning the word “bullshit.”

In trying to use profanity while not technically articulating it, we wind up in a loophole realm of self-aware absurdity.  Just look at the gleeful way programs like “The Daily Show” and “South Park” lavishly throw around the bleep button. That’s not avoiding the words — it’s brattily getting around them, in a gambit as old as a chorus of “Miss Lucy.” What point does a bleep or a series of dashes make, when all it does is dress a word in a sexy, see-through protective layer, the better to be unwrapped in your own mind? Oh, F-word,  I know what a nasty little thing you really are when you get together with your last three letters. You are not boinking or canoodling or doing the do, are you? No, you’re the reason nobody ever asks, What the “make love”?

I don’t get ruffled about run-of-the-mill cursing, and I think Goldman Sachs’ recent edict that employees not use cuss words — even if they judiciously throw in the asterisk — is hilarious. (Also hilarious — that the company won’t tell its staff outright what those verboten words are.) But I do understand the tremendous power of words to be truly hurtful and offensive. There are a handful with a long, rich history of demeaning and belittling others, and I don’t have enough hate within me to apply them to anyone else. Yet even then, does it mean they can’t be said?

This summer, the news media’s twisting of itself into contortions to report the content of Mel Gibson’s alleged tirades without coming out and repeating the words he used has been a spectacle unto itself. When I’ve written about the controversy, I’ve used them without equivocation, because they are the crux of the story. And there’s got to be a difference between being the guy who calls his girlfriend a “cunt” and being the person who says, “that guy called his girlfriend a cunt.”

There wouldn’t be much point in having ostensibly naughty words if they didn’t make us feel so good saying them — and if there weren’t anybody around to get pissed off when we do. That’s precisely why CBS opted not to call its new series “Stuff My Dad Says” – where’s the mischief in that? Yet when my daughters sing along with Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend,” changing the lyrics to “Bleep yeah I’m the mother bleeping princess,” I don’t think I’ve done my job to shield them from foul words. I just think they’ve watched enough television to catch on to the cleverest bad word the English language evolved. I’m not fooled. And as an all-purpose mot juste, “bleep” can kiss my ass.

This decision has been a long time coming. In 2004, the FCC changed its own rules to state “that a single, nonliteral use of an expletive (a so-called ‘fleeting expletive’) could be actionably indecent” in response to a slew of complaints the agency got after Bono dropped the f-bomb at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards when receiving the award for, I don’t know, the Last Relevant Album by U2.

Since then, the FCC has been regularly and aggressively fining companies for indecency violations — and they’ve multiplied the fines by the number of member stations the word was broadcast on to, vastly increasing their indecent haul. As the Court writes here, “the fine for a single expletive uttered during a broadcast could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars.”

This fleeting expletive fine has always seemed a dumb rule to me. The point of a fine is to make bad behavior a financial nuisance to an individual, thus encouraging a change in said behavior. For instance: I don’t speed in part because I can’t afford the ticket (and also safety concerns, etc.).

This particular fine, though, punished a network for putting on air a broadcaster or entertainer who might let slip an exclamatory and accidental phrase. The only way to guard against that would be a conscious campaign of not only eliminating such language from your own head — difficult — but also from your environment. No more hanging out with salty Uncle Mort. No more watching television after 10 p.m. Cancel the HBO subscription. No movies over PG-13. Don’t want those curse words to slip in. Also, no one invite Bono to any live-filmed awards show ever.

This, it appears, is similar to what the networks who challenged the FCC’s “fleeting expletive” policy argued:

The Networks argue that the FCC’s indecency test is unconstitutionally vague because it provides no clear guidelines as to what is covered and thus forces broadcasters to “steer far wider of the unlawful zone,” rather than risk massive fines.

Even without exaggerating this (as I did) to an Amish-like existence, it’s clear to see how a vague rule about what constitutes offensive language could chill both speech and behavior on live TV. That’s where the First Amendment comes in to play.

It’s also not hard to imagine how this could have an effect on political discourse, not just the random outbursts of peppy pop stars. What if the word “torture,” which has been so very controversial in the media for the last few years, began to be considered indecent because it conjures up disturbing images? What if having a live, televised debate between two presidential candidates became too much of a financial risk for a television station, because one of them might insist on discussing it? Could TV stations be fined for showing photographs of what American service members did to prisoners in Iraq? Would they be willing to take the risk and find out?

The Court ended up agreeing with the networks in the fleeting expletive case. The FCC’s argument was, basically, that it needed flexible (read: vague) rules to keep up with the many different ways that people can say offensive things. The Court responded, “Hell, no”:

The English language is rife with creative ways of depicting sexual or excretory organs or activities, and even if the FCC were able to provide a complete list of all such expressions, new offensive and indecent words are invented every day. For many years after Pacifica, the FCC decided to focus its enforcement efforts solely on the seven “dirty” words in the Carlin monologue. See Infinity Order, 3 F.C.C. Rcd. 930, at ¶ 5 (1987). This strategy had its limitations — it meant that some indecent speech that did not employ these seven words slipped through the cracks. However, it had the advantage of providing broadcasters with a clear list of words that were prohibited. Not surprisingly, in the nine years between Pacifica and the FCC’s abandonment of this policy, not a single enforcement action was brought. This could be because we lived in a simpler time before such foul language was common. Or, it could be that the FCC’s policy was sufficiently clear that broadcasters knew what was prohibited.

It seems clear which of those possibilities — we used to live in simpler times or the FCC used to have its act together — the Court endorses. Good work, Court. Hope it doesn’t get reversed on appeal this time.