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We will now dissect the last two of the six grammar curiosities and
crudities that I asked readers to fix three columns ago to test
their own English proficiency:
“News photos showed the derailed train laying
at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a
carriage that had fallen onto its side.” (Foreign news service
story)
“As a young short story fellow at the UP
National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago, the workshop
banner carried our batch’s official theme: Who do you write
for?” (Newspaper columnist).
Grammar-savvy readers must have easily figured
out what’s wrong with the first sentence above. It misuses the
progressive form of the transitive verb “lay,” which means “to
put or set something down.” The correct verb to use here is the
progressive form of the intransitive “lie,” which means “to
stay at rest horizontally,” as shown in the corrected sentence
below:
“News photos showed the derailed train lying
at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a
carriage that had fallen onto its side.”
But the more interesting question is: Why are
people so prone to mixing up “lay” and “lie”? Well, to begin
with, they are look-alikes, sound-alikes, and mean-alikes. Even
worse, they sometimes inflect into a bewildering form in certain
tenses; oddly, for instance, the past-tense form of the intransitive
“lie” takes exactly the same form as that of the present-tense
plural of the transitive “lay”—“lay” in both cases. It’s
really no wonder why even seasoned writers and editors often bungle
their use.
(If you think I’m overstating the case about
how notoriously misused this verb-pair is, look at this recent
reportage by a foreign news service on the earthquake devastation in
China: ‘An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in
blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a
hospital bed in the parking lot.’ The correct verb form here is,
of course, ‘lying,’ the progressive form of the intransitive
verb ‘lie.’)
As to the second problematic sentence in
question, its message has been mangled by a badly misplaced
modifier. The prepositional phrase “as a young short story fellow
at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago”
absurdly modifies the wrong subject, “the workshop banner.” Its
proper and logical subject is, in fact, the “young short-story
fellow” or the author herself.
This is a very serious grammatical problem and
I’m quite sure that many readers didn’t find it so easy to fix.
Indeed, it took me quite an effort to break that bad interlock
between the modifying phrase and its wrong subject. At any rate, I
finally came up with these three major overhauls:
(1) “I recall that when I attended the
UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow
a decade ago, the workshop banner for our batch carried this
official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’”
(2) “A decade ago, when I attended the UP
National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow,
the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme:
‘Who do you write for?’”
(3) “A decade ago, I attended the UP National
Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow and I recall
that the workshop banner carried this official theme for our batch:
“Who do you write for?”
Our best defense against misplaced modifiers is
nothing less than eternal vigilance over our language, not just over
form or grammar. We must always check for logic. If what we’re
saying looks grammatically correct but somehow doesn’t make sense,
it’s a telltale sign of a misplaced modifier somewhere. We need to
hunt it down to prevent it from doing mischief on our prose.
(To fortify yourselves against grammar
crudities, read my new book, The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar
Errors, which is now available in selected Metro Manila bookstores.
Check it out at www.manilatimes.net/josecarillobooks.)
j8carillo@yahoo.com
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