A teacher gets it wrong, then right

Two essentially unrelated Luann comics, except they feature the same two characters, first in 2006, the second in 2007. First, Miss Phelps gets one of my pet peeves wrong:

“Lies” happens to be correct. However, she catches the error in the next comic:

And, to answer Mr. Fogarty’s question in the first strip, the future was considered to be behind us by the ancient Greeks. They pictured us as moving backwards through time, because you can see the past, but you can’t see the future!

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Last time I featured a curmudgeon who likes to correct certain mistakes in others’ grammar. Another battle that we curmudgeons are going to lose is using lay and lie correctly. LAY is TRANSITIVE, people! Harrumpf. You always should lay SOMETHING down. When you stretch out on the bed, it’s LIE down. See? No direct object. Harrumpf again.

So this guy in Speed Bump (Dec 21, 2013) got his revenge. Too bad he’s not around to enjoy all the grammarian teeth grinding he’s causing, and I wonder what he had to pay the monument guy to engrave his tombstone that way.

I’ve mentioned this pair of verbs more than once in the past, by the way. Alas, my dear sweet wife does not belong to my grammatical camp.

…The New York Times, of all places. This newspaper, whatever you say about its politics, used to be the standard of good and correct writing to which any writer of non-fiction could aspire. Now I must say Beware of imitating how the NYT is written.

I’m in the middle of a photo article that reviews 2011 with 365 photographs. It’s an interesting article, and here’s the link: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/12/31/lightbox-365-a-year-in-photographs.

Photo 57, dated February 26 has a nice NASA photo of the ISS and the space shuttle with the earth in the background. “Backdrop,” even when used as a verb, is one word, folks.

“In this handout image provided by NASA, back dropped by a blue and white part of Earth, space shuttle Discovery approaches the International Space Station during STS-133 rendezvous and docking operations in Space.”

Photo 131, for May 11, has, and I quote, shuddering,

“A young Afghan boy who was shot in the stomach lays on a stretcher as he is taken to hospital in a medevac helicopter in the volatile Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan.”

I’m not trivializing the human tragedy here by mentioning bad grammar.  Reporters and editors doing sloppy work do the trivializing. I discussed this verb a while back, here and here. The NYT should know better. (Full disclosure: they got the verb right in the Sept 13 photo.)

Photo 191, dated July 10, has this monument to carelessness:

A female passerby adjust her hair using the glass in the front door of the temporary residence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anne Sinclair in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.

Third person singular present tense of “adjust” is “adjusts.”  But you knew that.

Photo 221, dated August 9:

A malnourished sick with TB is being washed by his mother in Banadir hospital.

A malnourished what?

The Sept 14 photo caption has “a police” where they mean “a policeman.” The Sept 20 caption says the people in the picture have their heads bowed in prayer.  They are standing, heads up, with their hands over their chests in the posture customarily taken when pledging allegiance.

Come on, you professionals at the NYT. Read my previous post.

To end on a cheerier note, here’s a NASA photo similar to the one in the NYT article.

Our Earth is the backdrop!

My wife suggested I post this conversation, no lie. And no pictures, either.

Recently I mentioned how to use the verbs “lie” and “lay.” “Lie” is intransitive—it doesn’t take a direct object. When you stretch out on the bed, you lie down. “Lay” is transitive—it takes a  direct object. You lay the book on the bed. Recently also I posted the hundredth post on this humble site, a post about good writing.

One fine evening, as we prepared for bed, my dear sweet wife and I were talking about the hundredth post on The Writing Rag, and things grammatical in general. As we lay there (past tense of lie), she complained that due to some recent minor surgery “I wish I could lay on my left side.” I waited two beats and said “It’s lie,” and fortunately for my life, she laughed (I long ago learned never to correct someone’s grammar unasked). Then she turned toward me, and asked, with a twinkle in her eye, “So do you wanna get laid or do you wanna get lied?”

Ah, yes, the life of a grammarian can be exciting. The question was strictly academic, of course.