Not Letting Sleeping Dogs Lay
When I was a schoolkid, grammar was my favorite subject. Conjugation, parsing--I loved it all. The rules of English seemed brilliant in their ability to channel babble into something tidy. I was a weird kid. Tidiness meant a lot to me.
But no matter how neatly I communicated on paper, when I opened my mouth, my grammar became a mess. I seemed to have two modes of expression, one for dress-up and one for everyday. The spoken word, so evanescent, fell into my latter mode. For a while in elementary school, I even said things like, “didn’t get no . . .” and “ain’t.”
This habit kept my poor mother perpetually on the verge of a stroke. Still, for a long time--through high school, through college, through 20 years worth of newspaper jobs--I lived a linguistic double life. If I put it in writing, I sounded all right. But verbally, everything came out along the lines of “duh.”
Then this year, I decided to try column writing, and a fellow journalist told me, “Just write the way you talk.” Here’s some advice: Never take advice from journalists. Stupidly, I scampered off to my keyboard and let my speaking voice fly.
Duh, voila! Out came everyday, ungrammatical me.
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Possibly you were among the embarrassing number of readers who noticed. It was in last Friday’s paper in a column about my family’s doomed love affair with a sport utility vehicle. Things had been clipping along nicely when, suddenly, my mouth assumed control of my keyboard, and I wrote that our kids liked the truck so much that they “laid down” on the seats.
If I’d just done it once, maybe I could have passed it off as a typo, but a few paragraphs later, I did it again. Well, there are a million English teachers in the Naked City, and in the days that ensued, I heard from every one of them.
The past tense of lie, in that context, is lay . . . The past tense of lie is lay . . . I would write it a hundred times but common courtesy dictates that I take pity on the poor parakeets who’ll eventually be doing their bathroom reading on this week’s offering.
Also, it wouldn’t help. I’ve known about lie, lay and laid since my weird schoolkid days. I knew very well how to use those words properly. And the moment my everyday voice hit the page, I screwed them up anyway.
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This interests me, and not just because I feel sheepish. There’s a funny tension between our private and public voices, between the messiness of intimacy and the tidiness of rules.
For example, my mistake has forced me to rethink our teenager’s habit of misspelling words she already knows. Silently and repeatedly over these past few years, I have cursed the teachers who made spelling optional in her grade school compositions because, in the name of “whole language,” they wanted to emphasize content and storytelling technique.
Their instruction produced a peach of a storyteller, but her every third word is phonetically spelled. (“Hey, that’s why God made spell-check,” she chirps as I verge on a stroke.) But now it has occurred to me: Suppose she sees two kinds of spelling the way I saw two kinds of grammar--one casual and one for keeps.
Suppose in her spelling there’s a hidden message: I trust you. I know you know what I mean. This kind of permissive thinking would depress me if I were an English teacher. But it reminds me of a conversation I once had with a psychologist.
We were talking, specifically, about a well-known guide to grammar called “The Elements of Style.” Maybe you know it. It is required reading in most composition classes, a slim little volume written in 1918 by the Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. and updated some decades later by the writer E.B. White.
The authors prized precision, and it is laid out like a rule book, with lists of commandments and do’s and don’ts. “Use the active voice,” it snaps. And: “In summaries, keep to one tense.” And: “Omit needless words.”
It’s so brief and so elegant that, at first glance, it makes language look easy. But it is deceptive, the psychologist said with a laugh. Those pithy directives are all but emotionally impossible to sustain. The mind wanders. The heart wavers. No mortal voice, written or spoken, possesses the constancy to always be active. Something in us needs those needless words.
Human connection ain’t easy, and connecting grammatically can be a life’s work. (White himself once wrote: “I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919.”) We strive for clarity and boldness, for perfection of grammar and spelling and style, but everyday words, like everyday minds, can be muddled and hard to tame.
Sooner or later, a person will talk the way she thinks. Or write the way she talks. And then there she’ll stand, revealed and untidy, hoping that you know what she means.
So, gentle readers, I beg your pardon. See, it was my inner illiterate that made that grammatical mess. I’ll try to do better. And, meanwhile, let your active voice fly if, God forbid, I ever lie another egg.
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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
