Luis de Góngora y Argote by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Google_Art_Project
It’s said a sure way to lose friends is to correct their grammar. A man of few friends already, I would be radically friendless if I piped up every time I heard or read “lay” used for “lie.”
I’ve told my dog Bess more than once that “lay” needs a direct object and an adverbial phrase: You “lay” <something> <somewhere>: the book on the table, the knife down, the fork on the left. When I “lay me down to sleep,” I’m not “laying” down to sleep, I’m reflexively laying an object called “me” down to sleep. Otherwise I “lie” down to sleep. “Lie” can take an adverb but not a direct object. I can lie down, lie quietly, or lie like a dog (the verb has different meanings), but I can’t “lie” the book, the knife or the fork anywhere.
Etc., etc. Bess stares at me attentively but I don’t think she cares. As who should?
Substituting “grammar” for “poetry” in the following passage from Auden’s elegy to Yeats drives home a certain perspective:
For *grammar* makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
A mouth, indeed, as in “He has a mouth on him!” Nevertheless, I hold certain periodicals to higher standards than others, and so from my ranch of isolation I grieve busily if ineffectually over a passage such as the following:
Also that year, Ms. Leigh had a solo exhibition at the Hammer. “Her approach to social practice — which insists that institutions expand their purview to create more space for a diversity of representations of black women,” said Ann Philbin, the museum’s director, “have encouraged museums to be more attentive to the needs of these audiences.” (Robin Pogrebin and Hilairie M. Sheets, “An Artist Ascendant: Simone Leigh Moves Into the Mainstream,” NYTimes, 8-29-18)
Because of her lengthy intercalation, rife with plurals, Ms. Philbin simply lost track of the singular subject of her sentence: “approach.” It happens, especially under deadlines. (The article was last updated at 3 AM Central Time, which is the middle of the night on my clock.) If I were an editor at the Times, I would at least have inserted “[sic]” after “have,” or else replaced it with “[has].”
The deal breaker on “lie” is that its past tense is “lay”: Yesterday at 3 pm I lay down and took a good nap. English has dealt us a bum hand with this verb. In a related matter, I told a colleague I was late for work because I got waylaid as I left home. He said he hoped it was way good.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
There Are No “Simple” Truths
https://www.suzannewagner.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/quote…
By labeling what was essentially an opinion as a “truth” I’ve fallen into a hole I try to skirt as much as I can. Better to have said, “I agree” that knowledge is better than ignorance, leaving truth out of it.
My mother was fond of pointing out that Thomas Gray didn’t write “Ignorance is bliss.” He wrote “Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.” There’s a rider attached to the proposition. I would get no joy from knowing when I’m going to die, for example. On the other hand, where government is concerned, knowledge trumps ignorance in the sense that the fewer secrets kept in high places for no good reason the better. Again, an opinion.
Gun fans compare firearms to pencils: Guns don’t *kill* any more than pencils *misspell*. I question the logic, but maybe it’s apt for knowledge, too: Nuclear physics didn’t build the atomic bomb then drop it on Japan, people did. A verb cropping up in opinion pieces is “weaponize.” It’s used as best I can see to describe the act of turning something that’s neutral or benign, intrinsically not a weapon, into one. This is where the guns-to-pencils analogy gives me pause: A gun, whether used for sport or homicide, is closer to being a weapon than a pencil is. More guns than pencils have been used in combat. However, a pencil, like a hatpin or passenger liner, can literally be “weaponized.”
So can the Internet. Seeking knowledge on the Internet is like supping with the devil — best done with a long spoon. The binary backbone of cyberspace supports much true-false, yes-no, good-bad, we-they, black-white dichotomizing. Seeker beware. Still, I can refresh my grasp of Manichaeism with a quick Wiki-dip, and have done so because as I’ve pondered this post I’ve kept thinking that somehow an allusion to Manichaeism is apposite. Wiki-erudition can be a mile wide and an inch deep, but I wouldn’t want Wikipedia to go away.
The same with Google. It lets a teacher unmask a student’s cannibalized essay text by merely typing a few words from it. That’s a powerful sleuth-tool, though it’s no less vexing that the same tool also facilitates the smash-and-grab plagiarism that teachers have to cope with in the first place.
It feels odd in a way, but also timely, to ask oneself: When does what’s “factual” overlap, if ever, with what’s “true?” Are fact and truth ever synonymous? I suppose the answer depends on whether you ask a scientist, a lawyer, a theologian, or the Internet.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]