You would be surprised how often I fake my knowledge of English.

You would think that as a native English speaker, I would be the rockstar of every English department meeting. That I would know the answers to all their grammatical questions. That I would know how to perfectly pronounce every word. 

But I realized today, as they argued over if clauses, that there are few rules to my English - just instinct. I cannot tell you why I put that verb in that tense or why that negative isn’t necessary, only that it isn’t. 

The English that we talk about at meetings isn’t my English. It is an English of rules and regulations that tries to reduce the language of Irving and Austen and Seuss and Foster Wallace to mathematical precision. 

I usually talk near the end of meetings. They think it’s because it’s hard to jump in the middle of nine Beninese men yelling at each other. It’s also because I’m trying to understand how they understand my language.