It doesn’t help that the past tense of “bet” is “bet.”
English is not exactly known for being consistent 
Tell me about it. I’ve taught English to Asian students for 13 years.
That’s ablaut reduplication, or the “i-a-o rule” in which English, in reduplicated words, goes from higher to lower vowels. “Flip-flop” instead of “Flop-flip”; “ping-pong” instead of “pong-ping,” “criss-cross,” “dilly-dally,” etc.
The mind may explode when trying to use this rule in a willy-nilly fashion…. (or should it be nilly-willy?)
Yeah I don’t know if there’s a corollary rule involving consonant precedence. I don’t think so.
For that reason, I always have to remind myself that the waterfall in Western Massachusetts is “Bash Bish” and not “Bish Bash.”
/hijack
I was about to correct you, that Bash Bish Falls is in New York State, but you’re right – it’s just across the border:
/h
A lot of what I’ve learned, especially in childhood, has been from reading fiction.
I will fully admit that I was probably taught that, and have since forgotten the actual definitions and effects, mainly because it has little effect on my day-to-day life. I believe I use the correct versions in my speaking/writing, but that is much more through experience than through intentionally choosing the correct form of the verb.
I honestly don’t remember the words “transitive” and “intransitive” from grammar school or high school. I feel it’s something I learned the word for later. I mean, we were taught about direct and indirect objects and stuff like that, but the explicit term “transitive” I have no recollection of from that time. I most remember it from doing a spell of English teaching in my 20s. And I know I never formally learned about stuff like first, second, third, zero conditionals until teaching it. (And I’m unlikely now that I’m years away from the material to remember which is which.)
I vaguely think I maybe remember the terms from around middle school English.
Funny but most of my (very limited) knowledge of formal grammar came from studying German in HS and college. I was taught lots of the technical details & English vocabulary of German grammar. Which transfers since linguistics is the vocabulary & study of the features of all language.
I recall some 35 years ago the head of my legal office circulated a memo on lie vs lay. I never thought it at all difficult.
Given what I’ve learned here about less vs fewer and the apostrophe plural, as well as the mantra that usage is descriptive, I’ve pretty much given up hope. I’ll continue to do my best to try to use what I consider “proper” grammar, and will likely think somewhat mildly negatively about folk who use “incorrect” grammar,” but I cannot imagine the situation in which I would ever again “correct” anyone.
Anything goes. Race ya to the bottom!
I understand your pain. To me it should be “lie down”. And if you teach someone incorrect grammar and pronunciation at an early age, it is very hard to fix it later. When people use the word “orientated” it really annoys me also!
PS. Once had a professor tell me that the sentence that I had written about a topic (It was Family Studies related because that was what the course was about.) that I can no longer remember was incorrect (She took marks off too!) because she said the word “impact” was a verb only and I could not use it as a noun. Sentence was something along the lines of, “Something had an impact on some other thing.”
If you realized how much of what is today considered “proper” language and shunned that, you’d never be able to complete a sentence again.
And about 99% of what people complain about is usage and not grammar.
No, it doesn’t. I bet a lot of the confusion is accounted for by that. The past-tense lay and the causative lay used to be different centuries ago, but they merged as sounds changed. Compare:
Modern English: intransitive lie - past tense lay - causative lay
Middle English: lien - leie - leyen
Old English: liċġan - læġ - leċġan
Proto-West Germanic: *liggjan - lag - laggjan
Proto-Germanic: ligjaną - lag - lagjaną
Proto-Indo-European: légʰyeti - légʰyet - logʰéyeti
“You made your own bed, you gotta le’g yeti in it”
Kinda loses something in translation.
It’s all about context. I have several different levels of diction and “correctness” depending on who I’m talking to and in what context I’m talking, and yet another couple depending on what medium I’m writing in and to what audience. That’s just part of effective communication, IMHO. I certainly don’t write the same way on the Dope as I do in a text or for something governed by the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press stylebook or when I was drafting up motions for some defense attorneys I used to work for. (Or “for whom I used to work” if I’m trying to affect an early-to-mid 20th century schoolmarmy vibe.) My creative writing is different yet. And when I’m hanging with my neighborhood buddies, I’m using local dialect, am unguarded about curse words, my pronunciation shifts to more “Chicagoese,” and I don’t talk as I would, say, with my university professor. All the various forms of language are beautiful and absorbingly interesting to me.