What's luck got to do with it?

[Skip Zilla]

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
~ E. B. White
[found at http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/a/advice.htm]

Luck is, in my estimation, the most important idea one can understand, not only about using language interestingly, but also about how the cosmos and everything in it happens. There's a lot of emphasis by scientists of various stripes on "rules" that determine how things happen; but they really know better: that a sense of predictable mechanics misses the deepest uncertainty out of which anything exists--including you and me!

[Skip Zilla]