A man's got to know his limitations. I have many.

The list of subjects about which I can confidently say "Oh, I know a lot about that" is exceedingly small.

This comes as no surprise to my friends and family. They'll tell you my knowledge tends to be extremely focused and not altogether useful.

Which I suppose would be OK if I hadn't spent the past 50+ years expecting that at some point, through some unknown process, I would come to understand a wide range of things.

But it hasn't happened. I have very little wisdom and even less common sense. I continue to be mystified by how appliances in my own house work, for example.

It also bothers me that I write every day for both personal and professional reasons, yet I'm not confident I can fully explain the proper use of a comma.

And a semicolon? Forget it.

I am, in short, stunningly ignorant on most topics.

This is one reason I have very few opinions, especially when it comes to politics. Someone will explain their point of view to me on an issue and I'll say, "Well, that sounds right to me." Then another person with an opposing viewpoint will explain their perspective and I'll say, "You know, that sounds right, too."

Maybe I just don't understand the nature of opinions. I'm looking for 100% black-and-white clarity when instead I should be looking for the perspective that seems to carry at least a little more weight. You can, I guess, acknowledge that a person brings up some valid points and still overall disagree with them.

Now, I don't want you to think I'm entirely useless as a human being. There are subjects on which I'm a pretty reliable source. Or at least you could do a lot worse than me if you have questions.

Here is the complete list of those subjects:

• The Australian band Men at Work's full discography and song lyrics
• The 1979 Cleveland Indians
• World War I battles on the Western Front, 1917-18
• Oatmeal: Is it just for breakfast? (THE EXTENT OF MY KNOWLEDGE HERE: "No.")
• Rolling a 300 game in Wii Sports Bowling
• Ottawa Senators goaltenders, 1992-present
• Choosing the correct container size when cleaning up after dinner and storing leftovers

And that's probably about it.

Oh, I'm also pretty good when it comes to Flintstones trivia. Call me the next time someone asks you what Barney Rubble did for a living.

At this point, I would settle for people not randomly capitalizing words

If you're someone who writes for a living or as a hobby, people often assume you're a stickler for grammar, punctuation and all the things your English teachers tried to get across to you.

I'm a writer (of sorts), but that isn't true of me. I don't go around judging people's spelling or word usage, mostly because I don't much care anymore.

While I understand the value of good grammar for clarity of communication, I am well past the days when I would carry around a virtual red pen and mentally edit every bit of writing I came across.

Part of the reason is the natural mellowing that often occurs with age. There are more important things to worry about, I find.

There's also the constant battle I wage against becoming a cranky old man. It's easy to find reasons to be angry and annoyed if you go around looking for them. I simply choose not to.

Then there's this question I often ask myself: How much does it really matter?

Again, yes, we have rules of usage and syntax and so forth for a reason. It's not about wanting to appear smart or trying to turn everyone in Shakespeare. It's about making sure we, as English speakers, are able to get our point across clearly and effectively whenever we speak or write.

Can I do that while still ending my sentence with a preposition? Yes, I can.

Can I do that while not understanding what a subordinate clause is and its role within a sentence? Yes, I can.

Can I do that without getting into a heated debate with a British person over whether collective nouns should be treated as singular or plural ("And the crowd are loving it!") ? Oh yes, I most certainly can.

The book pictured above sits on my desk at work, but I'll be the first to admit it's more decorative than anything else. As you might expect, "Warriner's Handbook of English" goes into great detail about parts of speech, sentence elements, phrases and clauses, pronoun cases, verb usage, modifiers, composition, spelling, and every aspect of punctuation you can think of, including the proper use of that pesky semicolon.

It was published in 1948. The preface to the book suggests it can be used as a teaching tool for 9th or 10th graders.

Maybe in 1948, sure. Nowadays, I don't think most adults could work their way through it.

Is that a bad thing? I'm not so sure it is. The way we communicate inevitably changes over time, regardless of what you and I think.

Here is the one thing I will ask of my contemporaries, though: Let's agree, collectively, to stop randomly capitalizing nouns. We are not German. Unless it's a proper noun (a specific name for a particular person, place or thing), and unless it's the first word in the sentence, it doesn't need to start with a capital letter.

Yes, there are exceptions in formal legal or business writing, but for the most part, keep 'em lower case.

If we can do that, I promise to scroll past your dangling modifier without saying a word.

Do you feel you were born at the right time?

This is at heart a silly question, because it implies people are either born at some vaguely defined "right" time or they should have lived in another era altogether.

In my opinion, you get what you get and you live when you live for a reason (even if you don't ever understand what that reason is). There is no "wrong" time for you to be here on this planet.

But...I realize many people are convinced they are better suited for living at a different time in history, so for the sake of this post, we'll run with it.

I will go on record as saying I'm perfectly fine with the age in which I'm living, and I'll tell you why.

I listen to a lot of Conan O'Brien's podcasts, and on one episode he said something that struck a chord. He looked at the things he does well and concluded (probably rightly) that in no other era could his individual talents have made him as rich and successful as he is right now in the 21st century.

I get that.

I am by no means rich, and any success I have is much less tangible than Conan's. But honestly, I can't imagine me living in, say, the 16th century.

For one thing, I would have to have a trade, and most trades involve the type of intelligence and/or mechanical and/or manual labor skills that I lack. Badly.

Oh, I know I probably wouldn't starve if I had been apprenticed to a cobbler or mason or anything like that. I would have managed to get to "semi-proficient" in my trade and found a way to support my wife and our 17 children, all of whom would have been living in a hut just outside of London or some such place.

But I never would have been especially good at it.

My skills and interests lie more in areas (writing, communications, etc.) that were the pursuits of a very small upper class until as recently as a century ago. They would have gotten me nowhere when it comes to putting food on the table.

Only here and now, in this age, are there abundant opportunities to put those types of skills to use and generate an income.

So for that reason, I'm thankful I was born in 1969 and not 1569 or sometime in the Middle Ages when my life expectancy would have been (generously) about 35 years.

If you think about it, there's really only a very narrow window in history when knowing the proper usage of a semicolon could earn you a living.