Und So Weiter

How exciting it is to hear the doorbell ring, find no one there, but spy a package left, one in the shape of a book! Today’s delivery is not for me, but for someone else. However, I broke in the book, read the preface, and a page or two of the text, checked the index to see if any of my families’ names were there—you never know—and have decided to ask to borrow the book after the one I’m giving it to has read it. Its subject is way out of my field, but I like to learn everything [long way to go], except the game of bridge. Friends have told me I’d love bridge; that’s why I never wanted to learn how to play it. Those poor books going to waste on the shelf!

Now I’m back into a book started along with others. It wasn’t laid aside because of lack of attraction. It’s most fascinating. Bloody Crimes by James Swanson, about Lincoln and Davis, remember? Jefferson Davis, president of the American Confederacy. It’s so intriguing that I actually want to underline every sentence, and I want to talk about every sentence in this blog. But I won’t. It’s enough to recommend it. Well, maybe not enough; I really want to stress the recommendation.

When I typed the word “laid” above, it reminded me of a terrible error I recently read in a book, The Heart Mender, I think it was. The line contained “had lay” instead of the correct “had lain.” Where lies the problem exactly? With the publishers or with the schools, elementary schools specifically? I say with the schools, and I do mean elementary, the level for mastering grammar. But if the author didn’t learn this in school, an editor at the publishing house should have caught it. If there’s any area of rampant grammar-not-learned in this country, it is with the verbs, to lie and to lay.

♥