By ANNE DONNELL

I noticed you mentioned recently you’ve been writing this for several years now which makes me sure you must have answered my question, but here goes anyway. When should I use “affect” and when should I use “effect”? I know your birthday is in May, so Happy Birthday! -A Buddy

When should you use…?  Why maybe at 3:00 PM you can use one and at 3:05 PM you could use the other, and then on another day alternate.

Oh, who really loves a smart aleck? Well, I do, as I love myself. How can one love others without loving oneself? And one is supposed to love others, even those who are miserably mean. Mark 12:31a  “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

So, loving you, I’ll give you a serious answer after a paragraph or two devoted to me.

And yes, I am a May baby, from a long ago May when the world was young and the dinosaurs only recently departed and saber-toothed tigers roared from distant hills filled with wooly mammoths. A May before Pearl Harbor.  A May when cars had running boards. A May with big, wooden radios as large as fireplaces. A May of washing machines with wringers. A May without interstates (well, the Constitution does mention interstate commerce). A May without Internet. A May without cell phones, dumb or smart. A May when the youth were polite and respectful to their elders – maybe, some of the time.

Facing the question of affect vs. effect, I managed an Internet journey on my now defunct computer. I like to brush up my book knowledge, and I found some brushing material on “Grammar Girl,” part of a website called Quick and Dirty Tips. 

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE! Why must the salacious slant be thrust upon us as commercially essential? (I don’t think Dirty is used here to tune us in to cleaning muddy floors, but the site isn’t smutty, either. I also tired of car commercials claiming the cars are “sexy.”) OK, so Dick Clark died, and I’m old.

Mignon Fogarty wrote, “I get asked whether to use affect or effect all the time and it is by far the most requested grammar topic.”

“It's actually pretty straightforward. The majority of the time you use affect with an a as a verb and effect with an e as a noun…. affect verb effect noun!”  [AVEN – see, last part of HEAVEN – that part’s my idea as old people do keep thinking about Heaven and such.]

“Affect with an a means ‘to influence,’ as in … ‘The rain affected Amy's hairdo.’ Affect can also mean, roughly, ‘to act in a way that you don't feel,’ as in, ‘She affected an air of superiority.’

“Effect with an e has a lot of subtle meanings as a noun, but to me the meaning ‘a result’ seems to be at the core of all the definitions. For example, you can say, …‘The sound effects were amazing,’ or ‘The rain had no effect on Amy's hairdo.’

“…So what about those rare meanings that don't follow the rules I just gave you? Well, affect can be used as a noun when you're talking about psychology--it means the mood that someone appears to have. For example, ‘She displayed a happy affect.’ Psychologists find it useful because they know that you can never really understand what someone else is feeling. You can only know how they appear to be feeling. And, effect can be used as a verb that essentially means ‘to bring about,’ or ‘to accomplish.’”

EXAMPLE  He hoped to effect change when he chose a political career.

WOW! All I had to do was write about my love of myself and paste “stuff” from online. 

ONLINE DEPARTMENT “The Window Through Which We Look” (Thanks, J.W.) A young couple moves into a new neighborhood.  The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean,” she said. “She doesn't know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.” Her husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. About a month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line, and said to her husband: “Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this.” The husband replied, “I got up early this morning andcleaned our windows.” And so it is with life. What we see when watching others, depends on the purity of the window through which we look.

“Punnier Than Ever” (Thanks, J.A.) • I changed my iPod's name to Titanic. Now it's syncing. • Jokes about German sausage are the wurst kind. • I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me. • This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore. • England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool. • I dropped out of Communism class because of lousy Marx. • A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy. • The earthquake in Washington was obviously the government's fault.

BW (Bigtime Word) glaucous – (in botany) anything pale bluish green or greenish blue. Yeah, I’ve seen that stuff.