Haven't seen a grammar thread pop up in awhile... (lay/lie, hyphens within!)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Look, I know grammar stuff can be annoying and pedantic. I would be the first to acknowledge that languages are living and constantly changing, and that I don’t always agree with the things that are absolutely correct according to the strict definitions of whomever it is that gets to decide these things. It’s a fine, fine line between the pedancy of adherence to rules and the chaos of popular usage.

All that being said, lay and lie aren’t that difficult. I know that there is some overlap in the forms of the verbs when you conjugate them, but there aren’t really all that many.

To lie is to rest or recline. It is intransitive.
present tense:lie
past tense: lay (note how this is confused with the other, unrelated word)
perfect (past or present): lain

So, we have these examples:
“Sundays I lie around the house.” present
“Yesterday we lay in bed all day.” past
“They have lain on the couch every evening for a month.” present perfect

Next, to lay is to put or place (something somewhere). It takes an object.
present: lay
past: laid
perfect: laid

“When I am done with my test, I lay my pencil down.” present
“In 186mumble, the Civil War generals laid down their arms.” past
“I had just laid my bike by the side of the road when someone stole it.” past perfect

The other thing that’s been appearing around the board recently is hyphens versus (em-)dashes. A hyphen is only one space long: -
A dash is two: –

Dashes are meant to set aside a section of text, and in my mind the text has always had weight somewhere in between a comma aside and a parentheses aside. Maybe someone can correct me on this if I’m thinking about it wrong. “John instructed his boss-- who had worked there for several years-- on the proper procedure of loading the copier.” I was taught to leave a space after the dash, but it doesn’t look like wikipedia is supporting me on this.

A hyphen joins two related things. It can be a last name: “Asok Franz-Gordon.” It can be a series of adjectives describing the same noun: “It was the two-year anniversary of Tom’s dunder-headed, no-good, I-think-I’m-smarter-than-you scheme to get rich.”

The hyphen/dash thing is actually more visually distracting to me when I’m reading than lay/lie is. Mixing the verbs is kind of grating, but when I see a hypen in place of a dash I actually mentally join the next word to the first, and then have to go back and reread when I realize it’s an aside in the sentence.

This has been your daily dose of pedantry. Please feel free to point out all the grammatical mistakes in my post. :slight_smile:

ETA: Sorry, I know I wasn’t very angry in my language here. I only posted in the pit because this stuff has been annoying me recently. Someone can feel free to move it if they so desire.

2

Of course, no one really has authority to deciding these things; there just is the way people talk. The laws of grammar are not legislated; they are empirically discovered, like those of physics. If someone postulates a law which doesn’t seem to actually be followed by a particular speech community (such as you may be discovering to hold of certain theories of usage of “lay” and “lie”), then that law is simply false as a description of that community; no more plaint-worthy aspect to their failure to adhere to this than there is in the universe’s failure to adhere to a distance-cubed law of gravity.

3

Off to MPSIMS.

4

I have two stock pet peeves right now.

First, I get fed up with people who say or write “utilize” when “use” will do. I have an ex-boss who did it all the time, and I saw it on far too many resumes. Look, folks, “use” is a perfectly good word. It’s shorter to say and shorter to write. Using “utilize” doesn’t make me think that you’re smart or that you have a good vocabulary. It just makes me think that you don’t have sense enough to use a five cent word instead of a fifty cent one.

Second, I’m getting tired of people waiting on me and others. No, I don’t have servants, and I don’t spend that much time in bars or restaurants. It seems that more and more people say they’re waiting on someone to arrive or something to happen instead of waiting for. I don’t understand why that’s happening or why “waiting on” should be more natural or make more sense than “waiting for.” I just know I see it more and more frequently. The most egregious recent offense was when a friend of mine who’s a writer had a general say it in his latest book. Aaargh!

(Excuse me while I sacrifice a cock to Gaudere.)

5

Yeah, but there are still “correct” ways to do things. You follow the Chicago manual, or Strunk and White, etc. Not everyone agrees on everything, but there are some things that are just plain wrong.

C’mon people, does the lay/lie thing really bother no one but me? It’s really only learning six words.

6

froths A space before and after the dash! :mad:

“John instructed his boss – who had worked there for several years – on the proper procedure of loading the copier.”

(Added spaces bolded for clarity)

7

Don’t get too frothy up there, in typesetting there are no spaces on either side of the em-dash. :slight_smile: (And it’s not formed by typing two hyphens, it’s its own thang.)

And don’t forget my favorite, the en-dash: used in between inclusive numbers (“I was ignorant of the en-dash from 1973–1991”) and when hyphenating a multiple-word phrase (“That’s indicative of the post–World War II mindset”). Unfortunately I can’t get the bugger to show up in my post, bah.

As for “lie” and “lay,” just pity the Russians.* They have a three-way distinction between “be lying down,” “be in the act of lying down,” and “lay [something] down,” plus their binary aspectual pairs, leading to a monstrous system of six verbs for the whole shebang. I won’t even mention that the pattern repeats itself with sitting and standing.

*And probably plenty of other Slavic languages; Russian’s just the one I know best.

8

Is that a bad thing?

9

Oh, I wasn’t being serious. The style guide for our transcriptions specifies a space on either side, and it’s gotten to where only one space or no spaces evoke a visceral reaction.

Anyway, I thought the bolded thing was pretty funny…

10

I form it by Alt-0151 on my numeric keypad. (And Alt-0150 is a minus sign.)

11

Unless you lied about having lain on the couch.

12

So what’s the hyphen doing in “BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed”?

13

Being depressed because her mother couldn’t pay for her coming out ball, so she could never become an en-dash, much less an em-dash. Plus the dope couldn’t handle the extra length that an em-dash would entail.

Coming out, extra length-- I might as well ask you what you’ve been doing with your “Boink” lately. Or who.

Just as an aside, I always associate your name with Thelonious Monk. You don’t play jazz piano, do you?

14

Also, grr. Don’t make me start a bad pun thread. Yes, yes, I know that’s redundant.

15

Seconded.

16

:smack: :smiley:
Yeah, I read carefully for a living!

17

I don’t make an effort to follow either of those. You can call me “just plain wrong” for it, but I don’t see why I should change.

I wouldn’t say no one else is bothered, but clearly the vast majority of people aren’t, as indicated by the fact that most people don’t react to these “errors” as though there were any problems. If they were real rules of grammar, wouldn’t laypeople actually notice them, the way they’d respond to actually grammatically malformed sentences like “I’m going couch to now the down on lie” or “I’m going to lain down on the couch now”? People are pretty familiar with how to speak. Why should they change their natural habits of speaking?

Incidentally, the bolded space thing almost singlehandedly made this thread worthwhile.

18

One of the possible reasons for the confusion (and perhaps people’s lack of concern) is that lie and lay both derive from the same source, (so claims M-W), being OE from OHG, from latin for a bed, and the two uses are very similar; to place in repose.

Why then should they have different irregular forms?

19

One form is the causitive (causative) of the other.

A tree falls. If I cause it to fall, I fell the tree. Fall / Fell.
A book lies on the table. If I cause it to lie there, I lay it there. Lie / Lay.

There are a lot of these pairs in English, distinguished by their internal vowels due to some obscure rule in proto-Germanic.

This was originally in reply to Apollyon, but it doesn’t actually answer his question, and in fact doesn’t contribute much at all. It’s just a fun fact I remember from a historical linguistics seminar.