Further proof that "lay/laid" is a lost cause

How hard is it to keep lie, lay, laid, lain in their proper places? Let's ask Philip Corbett, the New York Times's standards editor. In yesterday's After Deadline blog, he listed this among the paper's usage missteps:

Mr. Zimmerman talked to police repeatedly and willingly, making statements that lay the groundwork for his self-defense case.

We use the article: “the police.”

It didn't take long for readers to point out the mistake Corbett had missed. "You should also use 'laid,' not the intransitive 'lay,'" said one: Zimmerman's statements laid the groundwork.

Lay, of course, can be transitive too -- in the present tense: "Lay the coats on that bed." But the Zimmerman sentence is cast in the past ("He talked to police"), so the usual sequence of tenses would call for the past-tense laid. "I know you are right" becomes, in the past, "I knew you were right" -- even if you still are right.

But not always. The writer might claim he meant to use the present tense of transitive lay, since  even though Zimmerman talked to police in the past, his statements are laying the groundwork for a defense. Brian Garner calls this the "ongoing-truth exception" to the standard tense shift: "When a subordinate clause states an ongoing or general truth, it should be in the present tense" whatever the main verb is. Thus "He said yesterday that he is Jewish, not ... that he was Jewish."

Garner seems to want to make this a rigid rule, so that every continuing truth would be stated in the present tense. That has not been the traditional practice, though. "The tense shift can always be disregarded when one wants to make a subordinate clause conspicuous," wrote Bergen and Cornelia Evans in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957):  "He told me the train leaves at three," for example, or "he taught that God is love." But usually, they caution, "the shift has nothing to do with 'real time.'" In most cases, we shift tenses naturally: "What did you say your name was?"

As far as I know, nobody before Garner suggested drawing a bright line between cases where the "ongoing-truth exception" was mandatory and those where it wasn't. Following it rigidly would create some odd sentences: "I knew you are right." "Mom thought my dress is too short." And often either version serves equally well: "She said he still believed/believes in Santa Claus." We've gotten along for centuries leaving the choice to the writer; why would we clutter up our heads with a rule now?

Extremely organic: "biodynamic"

Writing in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson wondered about the nature of the "biodynamic skin creams" on display at this year's Brooklyn Baby Expo. "Is biodynamic a subset of organic, or something else?" he asked parenthetically.

Adam and I are behind the times, it seems. I had the same question after a recent visit to the Bay Area: The menu at a popular San Francisco restaurant offered a spritzer made from "Seltzer Sisters soda water with Nikolaihof biodynamic elderflower syrup."

I soon discovered that this isn't just West Coast woo-woo. Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge also stocks the elderflower syrup, made at "the oldest wine estate in Austria," where the Saahs family "still use a wine cellar built by the Romans."

The entire estate is run according to biodynamic principles. As a result, the Saahs plant and harvest according to the moon calendar and use only homeopathic treatments for the grapevines and other plants.

But that summary barely scratches the surface, as the Wikipedia article makes clear. Turns out that biodynamic agriculture is one of the many offspring of the protean social reformer Rudolf Steiner, who's perhaps best known today as the founder of Waldorf education. Whole child, whole farm -- it's the same idea, more or less.

And what does it involve? A winery's website has a nice summary:

[Steiner] espoused the principle that a farm should be considered as an organism or self-contained entity. As far as possible the bio-dynamics of the farm should be in balance and harmony. In practice, this is achieved by avoiding the use of toxic chemicals for controlling pests and the use of artificial fertilizers, balancing farm outputs to inputs, developing sustainable ratios for cultivation, cropping and livestock activities and using on-farm materials for soil enrichment.

These materials include a number of homemade compost enhancers such as recipe no. 502:

Yarrow blossoms (Achillea millefolium) are stuffed into urinary bladders from Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), placed in the sun during summer, buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.

Call it extreme organic farming (because "organic farming on steroids" would just be so wrong!). And though the science (naturally) is contested, I'll gladly concede that a farmer willing to stuff yarrow into deer bladders, bury it, then dig it up again has earned the premium price that "biodynamic" produce surely commands. 

Fine distinctions: careering, fearing, recollecting

Last week at You Don't Say, John McIntyre responded to one of those true believers who think that so long as they still distinguish between overlapping words -- career and careen were the pair at issue -- everyone else should too. "Why on earth would we dispose of such a useful distinction?" asked the commenter.

This rhetorical challenge is a perfect example of begging the question, in the old sense. Who says it's "useful"? If I found it useful, wouldn't I be using it?* In any case, Gabe Doyle gave this issue the full treatment way back in 2009, so I won't dwell on it. 

As John kindly mentioned, my annotated edition of Ambrose Bierce's "Write It Right" includes abundant examples of similar alleged distinctions. In the case of remember vs. recollect, for instance, Bierce says the difficulty governs the verb choice: "We remember automatically; in recollecting we make a conscious effort."

This seems to be an uncritical borrowing from Richard Grant White, whose 1870 "Words and Their Uses, Past and Present" is the earliest source of the "rule" I've found. There are few later sources, presumably because the rule is so pointless. Why would a listener care if you were recalling something with effort or not? And wouldn't the rule make it incorrect ever to say "I can't remember X"? At any rate, the distinction never took hold, even among sticklers.

Another Bierce bugbear was discussed at Arnold Zwicky's blog the other day: "I'm afraid" vs. "I fear." Bierce says "I fear that it will rain" is correct, though he gives no reason. He may have swiped this one from an 1855 handbook by one Walton Burgess, grandly titled "500 Mistakes of Daily Occurrence, in Speaking, Writing, and Pronouncing the English Language, Corrected." Burgess uses the same "rain" example, and he does give a reason: that "afraid expresses terror; fear may mean only anxiety."

But as Arnold noted, there's no historical support for banning "I'm afraid" in the polite/apologetic sense. And even if Burgess's distinction once held, today we hear "I fear" as quite formal, and freely use "I'm afraid" to express both fear and mere regret or anxiety.

I leave for another day Bierce's attempts to differentiate between necessities and necessaries, coat and coating (of paint), trifling and trivial, custom and habit. Suffice it to say that a century later, we're doing very well without them.

*Of course there are always distinctions that remain "meaningful" for some of us even when Those Kids have dropped them; I still think "he may have survived" and "he might have survived" mean different things, but lots of people no longer read the verb as I do. 

Bernanke gets it right

Belated congratulations to Ben Bernanke, who included an oft-mangled Biblical passage in his commencement speech at Princeton last Sunday and managed to get it right: 

As the Gospel of Luke says (and I'm sure my rabbi will forgive me for quoting the New Testament in a good cause): "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded."  It's kind of like grading on the curve.* 

The Kennedys were fond of the Biblical admonition too, and misquoted it through several generations. In 1997, I wrote a Globe column** about JFK Jr.'s garbled version, printed in his magazine, George: "To whom much is given, much is expected, right?"

But it turns out the passage has confounded would-be quoters for centuries. When Mark Liberman took up the question at Language Log, in 2007, he found ungrammatical versions dating back to 1826. "However you decide to connect everything up," he wrote, "somewhere in there you need to tell us that much is expected from people, when much is given to them." Apparently that's harder than it sounds, even for educated native speakers.

Bernanke also went with singular they in a couple of instances:

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

Take a few minutes the first chance you get and talk to an alum participating in their 25th, or 30th, or 40th reunion.

These were departures from the published text, where the first quote read "any 22-year-old who thinks he or she knows where they will be," and the second had "his or her 25th ... reunion." In speech, of course, singular they is utterly  natural, and Bernanke didn't hesitate to use it.

*'I've quoted the speech as delivered; the text version has a couple of small differences, including a footnote for the Bible quotation: "Luke 12:48, New Revised Standard Version Bible."

**Behind a paywall now, I'm sorry to say.