I prefer is not wrong

In a calligraphy class in Cairo, a teacher walks along the row of desks looking at the students' work.

Some of what he points out is simply correct. The height of a letter is set by the rules of the script, measured in dots of the pen. A stroke that breaks the proportion is wrong, and the student needs to know it. There are standards here that took centuries to settle, and nobody learns the craft by ignoring them.

But much of what lands on his desk is not that. One student has chosen a warm brown ink. Another has left more space around the words than he would. A third has given a final flourish a little more sweep than the teacher likes.

None of those is a mistake. They are choices, and his reaction to them is a preference.

How he says it matters more than it seems. If he says this is wrong about the brown ink, he teaches the room that his taste is the rule, and the students start trying to please him instead of finding their own hand. If he says I would have chosen a darker ink, they learn something about him, weigh it, and keep going.

The first sounds stronger. It is actually weaker, because it borrows authority it does not have. His authority comes from knowing the rules of the letters, and from being honest about where those rules stop.

Every group that makes things together has this teacher in it, at a desk or at the head of a table. The useful ones know which of their reactions are standards and which are taste, and they say so out loud.

Turning taste into law does not raise the standard. It just quietens the people with something new to offer.