Bianca Steele

There lay he, stretched along, like a wounded knight.

Joan Wickersham op-ed in Globe last Saturday, on grammar:

But before you go lie down, you’ll need to lay down your fork. “To lie,” means “to recline”; “to lay” means “to place or put.”

That’s pretty straightforward, assuming that this is all happening right now. But suppose it happened yesterday? Suppose that yesterday you ate a lot, and then you got rid of your fork and then reclined? It would be correct to write, “Yesterday I laid down my fork and then I lay down.”

So can we say that if you recline today it’s “lie,” and if you reclined yesterday it’s “lay”? Not exactly. Suppose you want to say that yesterday at your grandmother’s you ate a lot and then made a decision to go and recline? It happened in the past, and yet the correct way to say it is, “I decided to lie down.”

Why?

Because “lay” is the simple past tense of the verb “lie,” but in the sentence “I decided to lie down,” “to lie” is the infinitive form of the verb, which here functions as the object of the simple-past-tense verb “decided.” That’s why.

She’s right, of course. 

On the other hand, I cannot actually bring myself to use the past tense of “to lie down,” in any situation where I feel required to use it correctly.  In a blog post, I’ll instead write something like “decide to lie down,” rather than write “lay down,” which seems stilted and actually a little bizarre.  In an IM I will probably write “laid,” though occasionally I get self-conscious about this and write “lay.”

I’m always pleased when I'm reading a children’s book to my daughter and it uses the word “lay” correctly, especially when it’s also used elegantly.  That doesn’t happen very often.  (Most American picture books, in particular, seem wedded to the idea of the casual.) 

What does get on my nerves is the use of “as” for “while.”  This doesn’t seem grammatical in the slightest; and maybe it’s colloquial somewhere, but I’ve never heard it in speech, any more than I’ve seen it in print.  I suppose it’s easier for a child to read than “while” is, and it’s probably more likely to be on basic word lists.  But what it feels is like a reactive attempt to avoid either “like” (which doesn’t actually fit anyway), or the whole controversy over the proper use of words like “since” (which doesn’t fit either but at least is close).

Re-reading Madeleine L'Engle

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young.  (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.)  L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time.  But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs.  None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects.

I’ve enjoyed many of Ness’s posts discussing young-adult novels of yesteryear.  Her re-reads of Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow certainly brought back memories.

UPDATE: Here is the list of books that Ness will re-read.

Picture Books: Hippo Goes Bananas

My daughter is two and doesn’t really understand lying yet, but she is enjoying this book by Marjorie Dennis Murray (illustrated by Kevin O’Malley) that illustrates the danger of rumor and jumping to conclusions.  Hippo wakes up with a toothache and crashes around wordlessly, causing minor havoc and waking up Cuckoo Bird.  Cuckoo Bird tells Monkey, in the process vastly overstating the extent of the damage.  Each animal in turn adds something to the story, accumulating “This Is the House that Jack Built”-style.  In the end, they end up curing Hippo’s toothache, but they also nearly risk causing the very environmental damage they’d baselessly imagined Hippo would have caused if they didn’t intervene: Hippo did not throw anything into the river, flooding the savanna, but that’s just what they do to him.

Another cool thing about the story is that surprisingly, it seems to be a variant on the Trolley Problem!  Instead of tipping a Fat Man over a bridge onto a railroad track, so as to save the lives of the people on a different siding, the animals tip Hippo over a cliff into a river, so as to prevent the spread of his supposed case of “skeeter fever.”  (Compare the illustration of their pushing him over to the illustration at the third of three links, above.)  Were their actions, in bumping Hippo down a cliff (illustrated in comic-book format), justifiable?  Was it okay to give Hippo a knock on the head and consequent headache in order to preserve the rest of them from the risk of catching skeeter fever?  If so, what if he had been big enough, or the river had been small enough, for him to have blocked its flow entirely—would it then still have been okay to dam the river and flood the savanna, so as to save themselves?  Or am I just thinking too much?