Take Sally's word for it

My friend Sally Prue (winner of the normblog Boxing Day literary quiz this year) has taken to blogging. Pay her a visit at The Word Den. Sally's plan is to focus on a word each day and give us, or prompt, some thoughts about it. Here's a post that especially appeals to me: it defends the use of 'and' or 'but' at the beginning of a sentence. I wrote an essay in the early 1970s, in which I had a paragraph starting with 'And'. It was eliminated by the person who prepared the text for publication. To this day I feel the rhythm of the thing is no good at that point. The 'And' was needed there, damn it!