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Word came—via Twitter, Tumblr, I don’t remember, something that starts with a t—that The New Yorker has been featuring on its Web site the five best sentences of the week. That was good to hear, as I collect great sentences, the way some people collect beach glass, small statues of turtles, or perceived insults.
I was disappointed to find, however, that “Backblogged: Our Five Favorite Sentences of the Week” consists of sentences from a rather small subset of published work, The New Yorker itself. No one admires The New Yorker more than I do. However, I judge a magazine, even The New Yorker, to be too small a sample to yield each week five sentences worthy of collecting: that is to say, sentences which you cannot think of a way to improve and which might have a chance of living on when the immediate...
At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled. According to the official White House transcript (which includes indications of laughter and applause), the president began by...
Enough already with the historical present. The go-to tense for history lecturers and NPR guests has worn out its welcome and is starting to come off as a twitchy reflex, as annoying as starting sentences with So or ending them with...
When I was young, as part of her regular grammar corrections, my mother would say, "People lie, chickens lay eggs." Apparently people regularly lay eggs or the use of "to lie" in the sense of being in a horizontal position has all but disappeared. I almost never hear anything but "lay" when people mean "lie." E.g., "I was laying around yesterday" or "I'm laying on my bed."
Unfortunately for me, this particular use (misuse) always makes me cringe, even as I try to be open to evolving language. It seems I'm either going to have to adjust or live with visions of humans laying eggs all about. In British writing, I do see lie used correctly where U.S. writers would use lay. Based on this fact alone, I have contemplated emigrating to the UK! Do you have any thoughts on the usage of these two verbs?--Allison McNeill
Well, maybe "all but disappeared" is an exaggeration, but Allison is definitely right about the popularity of "lay" as present...
The e-mail from my colleague at the Lingua Franca blog, Geoffrey Pullum, read, “Most things, yes. It’s a bit of a problem. I have often written pieces that then had to be just tossed in the electronic trash because he published a longer and better discussion before I was finished. And I ought to be five hours ahead of both of you, on UK time.”
He was responding to my own e-mail, which asked, simply, “Does Liberman get to EVERYTHING first?”
“Liberman” would be Mark Liberman, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder, along with Lingua Franca’s own Geoffrey Pullum, of the super-awesome blog Language Log. The sheer number of Mark’s posts demands an adjective that goes well beyond prolific. The upsetting thing is that they’re usually really good, too.
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