Slang a la the NYT

[Dave Wilton]

It can't be a remote conditional. The full sentence is:

"If I lay down on the living room floor and whimper quietly to myself for
long enough, it'll eventually be winter and I can be a human being again."

For it to be a remote conditional, it would have to read "whimpered" as
well. Or since the outcome is known, it would really have to read:

"If I had lain down on the living room floor and whimpered quietly to myself
for long enough, it would have eventually been winter and I would have been
a human being again."

I would chalk the "error" up to the fact that this is a blog, not subject to
the usual editorial scrutiny, and the fact that the lay/lie distinction is
so skunked and muddled that vanishingly few use it "correctly" all the time.



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Neal Whitman
Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2014 1:13 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Slang a la the NYT

Maybe it was a remote conditional, using the paste tense of "lie":
http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/if-i-just-lay-here/

Neal

On 10/5/2014 12:49 PM, David Daniel wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Daniel <david at COARSECOURSES.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Slang a la the NYT
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> I liked her NYT article on slang, then went on to check out the blog 
> and almost immediately, like in line 4, was horrified to see: "...if I 
> lay down on the living room floor..." WTF? World-renowned 
> lexicographer and language writer uses lay for lie? So I decided that 
> whatever else she had to say was probably tainted and I lost interest and
stopped reading. Sigh.
> DAD
>
>
>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Slang a la the NYT
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
> ---
>
> Also, Kory is a she. I highly recommend her blog on lexicography, 
> Harmless Drudgery.
>
> http://korystamper.wordpress.com/
>
> I cited it when I had the opportunity to opine on matters 
> lexicographical for the NYT op/ed section.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/lies-murder-lexicography-dic
> tionar
> y.html?pagewanted=all
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:
>> I don't see any problem with Stamper's article. It's basically just a 
>> piece that highlights the problem of the recency illusion, i.e., just 
>> because a term is in vogue, doesn't mean it's new. I haven't checked 
>> her specific claims, but none of Stamper's examples seem wrong on 
>> their face.
>>
>> And in this case, the op-ed is written by a real lexicographer, 
>> someone with training and expertise in the field, not by some 
>> journalist who half remembers some lesson his eighth-grade English
teacher taught him.
>> As far as newspaper articles that address language go, this is one of 
>> the better ones.
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 3:52 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> [T]he word "dude" predates the Dude of "The Big Lebowski" fame by 
>>> over 100 years.
>>>
>>> http://goo.gl/sq2KHJ
>>>
>>> It does?! For real?!!!
>>>
>>> Lest anyone waste his running it down to me, no, I'm not serious. 
>>> I'm annoyed that someone can simply pull bullshit out his ass and 
>>> get it published in the NYT, even when it has nothing to do with
politics.
>>>
>>> Youneverknow.
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--
Dr. Neal Whitman
Lecturer, ESL Composition
School of Teaching and Learning
College of Education and Human Ecology
Arps Hall
1945 North High Street
whitman.11 at osu.edu
(614) 260-1622


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