In a sweet essay on studying Chaucer in his senior year at Penn State, R Thomas Berner quotes that fine opening line from The Parliament of Fowls: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” Chaucer’s poem examines love, but the craft I have wrestled with for more than 40 years is writing and editing.

The dustup during the past week or so over The Elements of Style — Geoffrey Pullum’s polemic against the beloved “little book,” the outraged ripostes from its defenders, the distractions of Farkery — points to the hazards of dogmatism, which I think may have been Professor Pullum’s actual target.

The Elements of Style contains useful material for writers, though more by example than precept. It also contains dated information, arbitrary statements, and some advice that is misguided. But the problem is not so much in the book itself, despite its defects and inadequacies, as in its most extreme advocates, who have made it a rule book.

The craft is not well served by dogmatism. Copy editors are familiar with the idiotic pronouncements of tinpot authorities in newsrooms, though perhaps a little more reluctant to acknowledge the rigidity among their colleagues on the desk. If you were, God help you, to read through the nearly 700 posts on this blog, you could see my own views shift and loosen up over the past three and a half years as responses from other writers, editors and teachers compelled me to examine my own views. There is always a strong possibility that we may be wrong.

This craft has no sacred texts. There are a few rules and principles to be acknowledged, there are texts to be consulted for advice, there are false rules and bad advice to be avoided, there is a language shifting like tectonic plates under our feet, and there is a lifelong struggle to develop and refine taste and judgment.

But for now, spring has come, intermittently, to Baltimore, and I have Professor Berner to thank for awakening the memories of a classroom 38 years ago in which Professor John Yunck introduced me to Chaucer. Aprill and Chaucer are as good as it gets. And I still have my battered Riverside Edition of selections from The Canterbury Tales.

There’s a sacred book.