There's always a worst day. This term I'm still trying to decide between Wednesday and Thursday.

I invariably stay up too late on Wednesday night doing something stupid — like trying to finish a few five-part Hellrazer plotlines or staging my own Law and Order marathon — and end up exhausted on Thursday. I hate getting up in the triple digits of the morning. Thursday mornings might suck.

I delivered the Chronicle on five hours of sleep this morning, which might explain why an entire bundle of papers disappeared though it still doesn't explain how. Delivering the papers was supposed to take an hour; it takes me a little over an hour and a half, but the money's very good. I got my last month's paycheck today and I feel like a millionaire.

The evenings are the worst part of Wednesdays. I'm at school from four until nine, which means a late dinner. And this Wednesday in creative nonfiction we read both of my recent attempts.

Needless to say, since I posted my bit about The Simpsons here last week, I'd already had some idea what I was going to hear. Noble Joshua suggested that I write something about the difference between an essay and an article, because for me that seemed to be the problem. I'd written essays, I thought.

I shouldn't have made such a foolish distinction, of course. I guess with all the academic writing I'd been doing, before my two writing workshops kicked it into high gear, I was fixated on the academic essay. One girl — I'm the only guy in that class, for whatever reason — wrote a stunning little personal essay about her mom cooking latkes.

You might see my essay on "my favorite meal" here someday, if I get around to revising it. Monday's assignment is "the best present I've received" and I'm going to try to make that one shine. I didn't even think to write like the personal essays I enjoy reading, last time.

The tail end of class was odd. We'd talked about one story by everyone in the class, and there's not enough time left to discuss more than a few stories, but the prof turned to my essay on the Simpsons to teach another object lesson. People were afraid to criticize anything, which is pretty typical of these workshops in my experience, but there were a lot of good points.

Then my prof, who's also an editor for the Chicago Tribune, points out an "error" in the following sentence:

While fans now complain about the show's reliance on celebrities — as of 2003, over 340 guest voices had appeared on the show, a Guinness world record — few object to the seamlessly integrated cameos of these early years.

Granted, this could be improved, but do you see the grammatical mistake? It just jumps out at you, doesn't it?

It shouldn't be "over 340 guest voices," he says. It should be "more than 340 guest voices." The preposition "over" expresses a spatial relationship.

Flabbergasted. One beat.

"I ate over 300 sandwiches..." I'm thinking out loud.

Perhaps it was the influence of so many Language Log posts on prescriptivism, but when this use of "over" continued to sound natural I didn't doubt myself. I told this veteran journalist flat out that his rule sounded like a pretty arbitrary distinction to me and I wondered aloud if he hadn't "been smoking a bit too much Elements of Style."

Judging by the collective sound of indrawn breath that was a bold statement to make.

To his credit, Prof. McNulty (who does indeed recommend that we all buy Elements of Style) took my criticism gracefully and suggested I look this rule up, do some research on the topic. I didn't really need that kind of encouragement, but when I got home I found just what you'd expect: widespread use of this sense of "over" in newspapers and on the Internet at large, and a bunch of webpages full of prescriptivist nonsense, singling this out as an error.

"Over" has many standard uses, including "more than in degree, quantity, or extent," a sense that goes back at least a thousand years according to some sources. But prescriptivism is a bit of a religion, and for some reason a few of the prophets have decided this sense of "over" is an error. (Strunk and White themselves are silent on the matter, for the record.)

It really bugs me that, if I want to get a job copy-editing at some point, I'll probably have to play by these arbitrary rules so that people much like this simpleton don't think I'm stupid. I'm already regretting the pointed use of "which" instead of "that" in one application essay.

Sleeping in tomorrow. I love Thursday nights.