Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/06/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:16 PM 6/6/05 -0400, Tina Manley wrote: > >I'm normally a stickler for good grammar and punctuation. My pet peeve is >that most people today, even professional writers, don't know the >difference between lie and lay. Tina "Lie" and "lay" give me problems on occasion, and they shouldn't, as I have a working knowledge of Old and Middle English and of the Indo-European which came before. My mother and father never had a problem with them, and the difference is in the English teachers they had in school. They enjoyed years of the demanding, stiff, formal, grammar-intensive English teachers who simply required that you get it right to the point that it was, in the end, simpler to come over to their side than to continue fighting a losing battle. Patience, persistence, and perfection, and they knew and taught them all. I am 55. My English teachers were all budding literary critics with one exception, my 11th grade English teacher, Miss Barbara Sipe, and she was damned by a literary-criticism curriculum through which she still tried to teach us real grammar and real syntactical relationships, and I will cherish her lessons for a long time. It was only in graduate school that Donald Kagan pulled me aside and gave me an hour's lecture in his office of just how to write a paper -- before you submit it, go over it in the mindset of your most bitter enemy, hoping to find grammatical howlers he can point out to make you seem a fool. That lesson stuck, and stuck well. (I have been chewed up one side and down the other for the content of my two books and many articles, but no one has yet found a grammatical mistake in the lot.) Kagan also taught me that "hopefully" is an adjective and that it is not a replacement for "I hope that". There was an English teacher in a local High School here in Roanoke who seems to have been much akin to Miss Sipe: several of her students have commented on her setting them right on grammatical absurdities. One of her students, a real estate agent who is a good friend of mine, taught me the correct pronunciation of "harass", as well, though the common pronunciation seems justified historically. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir! NEW FAX NUMBER: +540-343-8505