This pet peeve comes up every time I take my favorite yoga class, because my teacher ends the class by saying, “Now lay on your backs for shavasana.” It’s enough to make this corpse turn in the grave. He should say now lie on your backs.

The distinction between lay and lie is not that hard, and I spend some ink on it both in Sin and Syntax and in Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch. You just need to understand that there are transitive verbs (which take direct objects) and intransitive verbs (which don’t.)

Here’s the quickie explanation: lay needs a direct object; lie doesn’t. Here’s the problem: The past tense of lay is laid. The past tense of lie is lay.

Last month, in Massachusetts, I was working on the new edition of Sin and Syntax, and one morning I played around with the vexing pair, posting this on Facebook: “Woke up this morning and looked out the window. As I lay sleeping, the snow god laid a white carpet at our feet. Lace lies in the oak tree. I may lay burlap over the rhododendron.

Got that? Don’t sweat it too hard if you didn’t. You’s join the ranks of Sing and Snore Ernie (“It feels good to lay down”), Byron (“there let him lay”) and Bob Dylan (“Lay Lady Lay”).

At the Writers Grotto, where I work with about 60 other writers in a labyrinthine office space near the San Francisco ball park, we distract ourselves with conversations over things like lay and lie. A recent listserv debate started when Elizabeth Bernstein looked up the difference between the two, found out she had it right, then asked for a second opinion, in an email whose subject header read “Now I lie me down to sleep”:

Elizabeth:  I am editing a memoir about a man’s five-year struggle with chronic pain. He is lying down throughout this book. He lies on doctors’ tables. He lies on the floor of his therapist’s office. He lies down in waiting rooms. Or, I should say, he lays?

I know a person lies, and a person lays down an object. But really, in the past, is the correct word “laid”? “I laid in bed and imagined the worst.” It looks … wrong.

Stephanie:  Wrong: I’m going to go lay down. Right: I’m going to go lie down.

This is the most frequent mistake I see. People overcorrect lie by using
lay in the present when you should do that only for an object.

But you’re asking about the past tense of lie. It’s lie, lay, lain.

Gerry: Then there’s the James Frey version: “I lay in my bed. I lie in my memoir.”

Justine: You would have to add, “I lied and got laid.”

Isaac: This is my favorite email thread of 2012. I’m submitting it to the editor of Best American Email Threads.

Connie: Lay and lie two diff verbs unfortunately joined at the lip bec present tense of lay and past of lie share same spelling. Key diff is that lay is transitive and lie intransitive. So lay needs an object to work. Chicken lays an egg then lies down. Yesterday chicken laid egg then lay down.

Isaac, please don’t overlook the most clichéd pun of tourists in Hawaii, now the inevitable t-shirt: I got lei’d in Hawaii.

Jason: Okay. But as far as I can tell, based on the current discussion there’s nothing wrong with this sentence, a supposedly true excerpt from a church newsletter: “This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.”

The stuff above appears in the new and improved Sin and Syntax, which will see its début in September. Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, which focuses on many other verbs as well, was released in October of 2012, so it’s too late for preview. But look over this post on heavenly and headache verbs , in which I add to what’s in the verb book, updating the list of my favorites and nemeses. For now the list is all phrasal verbs, but over the next few months I’ll change that up and sprinkle even more tidbits on this blog.

Because, of course, in my world, every day is Grammar Day.

]]> http://sinandsyntax.com/blog/laying-down-the-line/feed/ 2 http://sinandsyntax.com/blog/writing-about-writing/ http://sinandsyntax.com/blog/writing-about-writing/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:26:47 +0000 Constance Hale http://sinandsyntax.com/?p=2022 I sometimes call myself an “accidental grammarian.” I’m known for books and articles about grammar, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about grammar and which parts of it are and aren’t useful to writers. But, really, I am a writer—or “Scribe” as my business card says. And I’ve written as much about style and structure and narration and dramatic tension as I have about syntax.

An article in the current issue of The Writer paints a pretty good portrait of the whole me, grammarian and otherwise. That the profile is something I’m comfortable with is a credit to the reporter, Elfrieda Abbe, who has previously been my editor. Because I know and trust her, and because Elfrieda is a good listener as well as a good questioner, we delved into sensitive areas I don’t much talk about—like how hard, really, it is to try to carve a life out as a writer, and the kinds of trade-offs I have made to keep doing it.

I mention the profile not out of vanity, but because I think it’s important that we writers speak honestly about “success,” money, and sacrifice, as well as the joys of the craft. But also, I want to let you know about this issue because the magazine, founded in 1887, was purchased this fall by Madavor Media. The new team is giving the magazine a boost of fresh energy. Editor Alicia Anstead, a colleague from my days at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, said in an email that the magazine’s mission remains the same: “to support writers in their craft.” She promises to do that through smart profiles, success stories, social media savvy, tips, and material that is provocative for “people who think about, live by, and aspire to achieve success through writing.”

Writing about writing is tough. On the one hand you want to be helpful and accessible. On the other hand, you want to be smart and sophisticated—you want to inspire readers. I love it when writing about writing makes the reader feel smart, and appeals to the genuine word lover. I’m especially fond of the Draft series in the New York Times Opinionator. Those posts walk the fine line between low-brow and high-. They reflect a mix of perspectives and they strike a tone appropriate for Times readers, who are on their toes (the comments are as good as the essays).

If you’d like to dip into the “Draft” series, start with “The Art of Being Still.” Silas House advises writers to stop talking about writing—or about not writing—and just get the work done. Silas advises to take time away from the chatter of conferences and the endless dithering of social media. “We must learn how to be still in our heads,” he writes, “to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened. The wonderful nonfiction writer Joyce Dyer refers to this as seeing like an animal.

To see like an animal. How is that for a New Year’s resolution?

Of course, most writers need community and inspiration as well as solitude and stillness.  For years I’ve been dreaming of a writers retreat at one of my favorite spots on the planet, Mokule‘ia Beach, on Oahu’s North Shore, where I grew up. Good news! A high-school friend is now executive director of a low-key, low-budge camp there, and we have developed a five-day retreat for writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and the memoir. From April 7 through 12 we will gather with others interested in exploring a sense of place in their work. I will be joined by wonderful writing teachers as well as cultural legends who will share insights on Native Hawaiian composition and poetry. If Hawaiian music and dance isn’t enough, our creative impulses will be set in motion with yoga, swimming, kayaking, beach walks, and a visit to Pu‘u O Mahuka Heiau, a well-preserved ancient Hawaiian temple. For information visit my Web site or email me.

Thanks for reading this far. I have some surprises up my sleeve for 2013, and I hope you’ll keep visiting this site. But more important: Keep writing!

I decided to do a tour for Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch. In October and November, I crisscrossed the country talking about how Hawaiian Creole shaped my approach toward language, how “experts” have battled over who owns English, and how verbs enliven even the most demure sentence.

In Vermont, 36 people crowded into my cousin’s bookstore in Hardwick. I used the occasion to tell the very personal story of my growing up “bilingual in English”—speaking Pidgin English as a kid in Hawaii, but grappling with a family of grammar sticklers like my aunt (who was in attendance).

At Amherst Books, only three people showed up for my talk—and one of them was my mother, visiting from the islands. Granted, it was a Friday night in a college town, so what did I expect? (This was not, BTW, the lowest turnout I endured.) Bookseller Nat Herold made the visit worth it, though, when he told me that Sin and Syntax sells more copies than William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, the classic that taught me how to write. Meeting Nat wasn’t the only benefit of our stop. Mom’s great-grandparents lived in Easthampton, her father went to Amherst College, and she went to Smith, so I counted my blessings for a mother-daughter night in the Western Massachusetts woods.

In Seattle, I led Grammar Speed Dating at Elliott Bay Book Company. (Send me an email if you want to try this at a party.) Some creative writing students from Seattle University won Shakespeare Insult Gum when they matched the subject and predicate from the title of my favorite Hamlet soliloquy, and my friend (and host) Laura won a whale bookmark for recognizing that the subject in “Call me Ishmael” is implied. A serious-looking writer won a set of postcards illustrating different facets of the verb “to love” when she came up with more synonyms for that verb than anyone else in the crowd.

At San Francisco’s Mechanics Institute, I mused on the five questions that sent me to linguistics tomes:

1. Was our first word a verb?
2. Why do writing experts say “Prefer the Anglo-Saxon word”?
3. Who came up with silly grammar rules like “Don’t split infinitives”?
4. Why is there such a battle royal between “prescriptivists” (aka grammarians) and “descriptivists” (aka linguists)?
5. Where are the interesting edges in verbs today?

In New York City, I treated 10 female friends to prosecco in a West Village basement, and I taught 400 teenagers at TED Youth the difference between static and dynamic verbs. I cracked up when two of them came onstage to act out Hamlet’s “to be” and “not to be” words. (See Bill Heyne’s depiction of “to die” here.)

I cannot lie. The book tour was exhilarating and … exhausting. There are moments of hilarity and moments of humility. It’s rough to adjust to a new bed every couple of nights, and to be “on” at 7 a.m. so that you can reduce your volume of ideas to sound bites that will work for drive-time radio in Colorado.

Then there’s the whole issue of reviews, which can turn you into Sally Field (“You like me, right now, you like me”) or W.C. Fields (“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”) If you’re curious, I’ve posted a list of notices under “News, Reviews, and Interviews.”

There are two things I’d like to say about tours. The first is for those who aren’t authors: Show up when your friends go on the road. Writing a book takes you way way way out on a limb, and it’s great to see people in the audience spotting you, willing to catch you if you fall.

The second is for authors. It helps to think that the book tour is for a writer what the average gig is for a jazz musician—it seasons you, at once elevating you and knocking you down a few pegs. You learn to believe in the magic of your horn even when no one is listening, to keep playing your blues even when the smoke is so thick you can barely see the Exit sign. You learn to revel in the moments when people pay attention, and to keep going when your mother is the only one in the room who thinks you a genius.

(The 19th-century poet was an uneducated farm laborer who went mad and was confined to an asylum; he continued to write poetry for the last twenty-five years of his life. Clare had delusions he was Lord Byron, among other personages.)

Clare detested grammar and did not know the formal conventions of punctuation in the early 19th century (to the extent that any existed) and, therefore, did not punctuate his poetry. Later editors have, of course, felt free to reverse-engineer the punctuation, and Hass in the class is inviting students to “time the emotions.”

Saldaña, rightly, thought I would enjoy some of the verbs Clare coined:

• chelp (to chirp or squeak);
• chicker (to chirp as a cricket);
• chuff (to swell or plump out [the cheeks]);
• nauntle (trans.: to lift, rear up; intrans.: to rise up, hold oneself erect)
• poddle (to walk with slow, short, or unsteady steps)
• soodle (to walk in a slow or leisurely manner; to stroll, saunter)

Clare is as inventive as Chaucer (who borrowed amble from Anglo-French) and Shakespeare (who coined verbs like arouse, drug, hoodwink, hurry, rant, and swagger) when it comes to coinages. Many people don’t realize this about English, but we have a robust history of creative folks inventing new words.

Think of these relatively recent additions to the lexicon: gadget probably came from late nineteenth-century sailors’ slang, scrounge was popularized by soldiers in World War I, square (as an adjective) came from jazzmen’s slang, and wangle wangled its way into the world of Standard English from the world of printers.

Today we an accelerated pace of neologisms in technology, not just in verbs like google and tweet and friend, but also in brand names like iPhone, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.

In citing these examples, I’ve soodled far from Clare’s imaginative verbs, so I’ll stop.

But I wonder: do you have some favorite coinages, from any era?

Well, I can’t answer that last question, but in preparing to write Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, which is wending its way into bookstores as I write this, I took a look at the collection of  Harvard University. (Why that library? Well, I was in Cambridge at the time, but it’s also the oldest library system in the United States, the largest private library system in the world, and the fourth largest library collection in the U.S., after the Library of Congress, Boston Public Library, and New York Public Library.)

Get this: Harvard’s Hollis catalog coughed up 7,291 titles. I found books on Kru verbs, Russian verbs, Tzutujil verbs, Dakota verbs, Hebrew verbs, and Welsh verbs. There was Das Verb in German. There was Alchimie du Verbe and Le Verbe Est un Navire in French. But there was no poetic “The Verb Is a Boat” in English, no prosaic one-stop shop, no Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Verbs But Were Afraid to Ask. There was no one book to help the hapless, sate the serious, or answer all the questions of the curious.

(The only  titles I found were geeky and ungainly: The English verb: a grammatical essay in the didactive form, “printed for” A. Millar in 1761; The English Verb: form and meanings, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1964; and The Verb in Contemporary English: theory and description, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. Spare me!)

The market was ripe for an entertaining book on verbs that slipped in a little erudition.

But, still, that’s not why I wanted to write a book on verbs. The truth was, I just had a lot to say about action words—about getting tense and being moody, about static sentences and dynamic ones, about the much maligned passive voice, and about all those myths out there about language generally.

After all, the verb is the heartbeat of every sentence. We can twist verbs into myriad tenses and moods to allow us to be precise about time and nuanced about intention. We can say that today we do the macarena, and that in eighth-grade dancing class we foxtrotted, and that we girls had waltzed with our doting fathers before we dared do it with boys. Unless, of course, we are planning our next trip to Buenos Aires; then we say “We will tango.” Or fantasizing, in which case we might say, “I wish I were tangoing right now.”

The verb pulses not just at the heart of our every memory, plan, and wish, but at the heart of English itself. “Verb” comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs. And without verbs we can’t have verbal dexterity, which is what this book aims to give you: the art of making sentences that are as enticing, graceful, sexy, and smooth as the tango.

But for all their primacy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Writers who swear by the importance of verbs over-rely on is and use flounder when they mean founder. Editors who rail against “passive constructions” overlook the essential purpose of static verbs: to act chivalrous and open the door for the nouns in the sentence. Self-appointed experts perpetuate rules (“Prefer the Anglo-Saxon”) that have been flat wrong for centuries. (If I were preferring the Anglo-Saxon, I couldn’t use prefer.) Teachers spread misunderstandings without doing their homework, and wordsmart authors fumble details (“Verbs fall into three categories: active, passive, and linking.” Not exactly).

Wrongheaded rules have been sanctified in books and repeated by schoolteachers. Mass media gave airtime to everyone from Donald Duck to Donald Trump, and new media gave everyone if not a microphone at least a microblog. Ever new crops of “experts” (would you trust Smashwords to help you unsmash your words?) put mainstream English above marvelous English.

This is the muddle we find ourselves in today. Yet we all yearn to write well. We long to speak eloquently. We dream of moving people with our words. Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is a response to this urge to master language. It all starts with the verb, the word linguist Steven Pinker calls “the little despot” of every sentence.

{Much of this post is excerpted from Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch. If you’d like to learn a little more about the book, check out the  “The Vex, Hex Manifesto,”  in the right-hand column.}

I try to have the grammar thing down, but there’s always more to learn. I love it when somebody really smart corrects me. Most recently, the “somebody really smart” was Patricia O’Conner, the author of several books, including Woe Is I and my one of my all-time favorite usage books, Origins of the Specious. Pat read the galleys of Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch and found a small error that would have turned my face carnelian had it made through page proofs and into print.

I was all set to call out this “error” in The New Yorker, which a friend brought to my attention. It appeared in the Comment section during the “Arab Spring” of 2011:

“The most striking and unexpected aspect of the protest is that none of these entities have been at the forefront.”

What do you think about that sentence? Is it fine? Is there something unnerving about the subject-verb agreement?

Here’s another suspect sentence, this one sent to me by a reader of the “Draft” series on Opionionator, in The New York Times. The sentence was written by someone who ought to know what’s right: Ben Yagoda, a grammar guru and the author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It! (Ben and I have both contributed to the “Draft” series; this excerpt is from his “The Most Comma Mistakes” post.)

“If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

“I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

“Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None are correct—unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend.”

The reader distrusted Yagoda’s “None are correct,” explaining in an email, “I had a grammar drill sergeant in high school who taught me that none is always singular, and I have not, until now, had occasion to question it. I would use the singular ‘none is’ to mean ‘not one is correct.’ What do you say?”

This reader, who happens to be a professor in Southern California, added that she checked some reliable sources to see whether none a singular indefinite pronoun. “OWL at Purdue and Hacker both ignore the word,” she writes, sounding very much the expert. “I have two freshman comp texts with handbooks, both of which say it is singular. My colleague’s 1965 Warriner’s says it depends on the sentence (ex: None of the students were present.)”

I ask you, blog reader, What do you say? Is none always singular (as in “not one”), always plural (as in “not any”), or a little of both?

I was all set to call both sentences wrong, and to repeat what I’d learned in high school, that none is singular and requires a singular verb. That was when Pat stepped in to gently correct me. She, of course, had dealt with the issue in Woe Is I, where she says that you need a singular verb if you mean “none of it,” and a plural verb if you mean “none of them.” In Origins of the Specious, she goes further, recounting the moment she sat down “ with a pot of tea and Volume X (moul to ovum) of the Oxford English Dictionary to explore the etymological roots of the irksome pronoun:

“It seems that ‘none’ has been both singular and plural since Anglo-Saxon days. Alfred the Great used it as a plural back in the ninth century, when he translated a work by the Roman philosopher Boethius.

“Although the OED lists numerous examples of both singular and plural nones since Alfred’s day, it says plurals have been more common, especially in modern times. How’s that for an eye-opener? As they say, ‘None are so blind as those who will not see.’ It’s true that ‘none’ is a descendant of the Old English nan, which indeed is a combination of ne (‘not’) plus an (‘one’). But ‘any’ is also descended from the Old English an, and historically ‘none’ has always been closer in meaning to ‘not any.’

“As we know, ‘any’ can be either singular (any of one thing, like vodka) or plural (any of many things, like martinis). Likewise, ‘none’ is sometimes singular (‘none of the vodka is chilled’) and sometimes plural (‘none of the martinis are left’)….”

She adds that by the late 1800s, the belief that none meant not one had been “elevated to the status of a ‘rule,’ flying in the face of nearly a thousand years of English usage.” Why? Well, some people prefer black-and-white “rules” over shades-of-gray linguistic reality.

Here’s what usage guru Bryan A. Garner says in Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed., page 569: “none = (1) not one; or (2) not any. Hence it may correctly take either a singular or a plural verb.” Garner mentions “the unfortunate fact that some stylists and publications insist that none is always singular, even in the most awkward constructions.”

This is probably way more than you need to know about the subject, but just so that you can feel really confident the next time someone challenges you, tell him that this information about none appears not just in O’Conner’s books or in Garner’s but in all three editions of Fowler, as well as Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, the Oxford English Grammar, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, all standard dictionaries (see the usage note in American Heritage 5th. ed.), and just about everywhere else.

Pat is second to none when it comes to this stuff.

A reader of my New York Times columns asked whether I might devote a post to a subject he has been struggling with: “being a painfully slow writer.” In particular, he asked these questions:

Are there practical ways to become more prolific without addressing psychological issues? For example, you are a prolific writer. What routines do you follow? When do you know it is time to stop writing and publish or submit? Finally what is your typical start to finish process? Do you outline? How do you write a first draft? What do you do differently in the second draft and so on through your writing process?

The email came at an interesting time—I had just spoken on a panel at a writers’ conference on the topic of “Write Fast, Make More Money.” I was flattered to be on the panel, but felt like an imposter.

Many journalists, academics, and bloggers seem to pride themselves on writing fast. Many editors value these speedy types. Given declining per-word rates, especially on Web sites, it’s no wonder writers are looking for ways to cut corners—or to cut to the chase. But I have to confess: I’m not a fast writer. The articles and books have piled up, and I have a good chunk of experience behind me, but I don’t feel “prolific,” either.

I have only two goals when I sit down to write: I want to create thoughtful, accurate, beautiful stuff, and I want to suffuse the piece—whether a post, an essay, a feature story, or a book—with my own voice.

But I am a working stiff; I have to meet deadlines and pay bills. So I have learned a few things to help me do both.

First, I got over my perfectionism by working in newspapers. I used to sweat over every little word, and it was stopping me up. It helped me to have real deadlines and to learn to just do my best, even if it wasn’t prize-winning prose. I allow myself messy first drafts, and trust that each successive draft improves a piece.

Second, I realize that there are many good ways to write a story, and no one “right” way. I trust my instincts about what’s most gripping and dig in. I give a piece my best shot, and trust my editors to help me shape it.

Finally, I have learned that writing fast is about making sure that I’m not procrastinating. I have some writing rituals, which get my creative juices flowing; they are part of my process. (Sweeping the patio is a good one; I think of it as “clearing the ground.” Reading something that inspires me in the morning is another.) I allow myself these rituals, then try to be good at recognizing when I am indeed procrastinating.

The rest is “discipline”—small habits that keep me focused and productive.

I establish clear boundaries around my writing time. I work set hours, start on time, and do not leave my chair (except for stretches and lunch) until I have worked six hours. “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,”
 wrote the activist and novelist Mary Heaton Vorse, and I agree. (When I had an office in my home, I worked from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Now I share an office space with a community of writers, and it requires a commute, so I work 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., leaving more time for lunch with colleagues.)

Whether it is a home office, a bare table in a getaway cabin, or my current space at the San Francisco Writers Grotto, I insist upon a dedicated writing space as well as a dedicated time. I don’t do finances here, I don’t plan tonight’s dinner, and I don’t read the newspaper. I write. I have a dedicated work phone, too. My friends don’t have the number, and my husband and mother have been trained not to use it.

Because I’m  disciplined about these things, I can cut myself some slack when it comes to the work. I don’t put pressure on myself to produce shimmering pages. I know that if I just show up and keep at the writing, things always start to click. Sometimes it’s not until the last half hour, but then I have a place to start the next morning.

If I’m really under the gun, with a deadline looming and some especially tough work ahead, I practice a time-management skill I call “rocks in the bucket.” I learned about it from a colleague at the American Society of Journalists and Authors, who explained it with an analogy. Suppose you have a bucket and four piles: rocks, stones, pebbles, and sand. You must put all the stuff (i.e., the work tasks) into the bucket (the work day). The best way to do it is to start with the rocks, then add the stones, then the pebbles. The sand is in-fill at the end. (If you try it the other way around, you’ll end up holding a bunch of rocks.

I make a list of all the things I need to do in the day—from reading a chapter for research, to writing an intro, to checking email, to calling my editor. I label each item according to importance. The rocks, the things I absolutely must do today, are the A’s. The slightly less critical things, the stones, are the B’s. Then I make a new list, grouping the A’s, the B’s, the C’s, etc. I give myself a time limit for each task and I stick to it. At the end of the day, I won’t have gotten everything done, but I will have knocked back the most important things, and I will have tackled them first, when my energy was best.

Discipline is well and good, but you can be very disciplined and be stuck in a rut. How do you stay refreshed, inspired? For that, see my essay “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” When I need to, I take a break, letting my mind wander, letting inspiration drift in. That can be part of my six hours. And I follow each workday with exercise, which recharges me for the next day. Brainstorms for the next chunk of work often come in Lane Three of the swimming pool, in hula class, or over a garden bed.

As for the process part of my reader’s question—Do I outline? Do I follow a certain practice with each draft? How long does the whole thing take—I’ll take that up in another post. I’m coming to the end of my six hours, and it’s time to slip off to the gym.

A couple of weeks ago, after I published the essay “Turning a Phrase” in The New York Times Opinionator area, I invited members of my Sin and Syntax mailing list (see the link in the column on the left) to send me their favorite dangling modifiers. And I promised to award a book to the sender of the one that most tickled my fancy.

I have to say, some of the danglers posted in the Comments section of Opinionator made me laugh, so I’ll take blogger’s prerogative and list some here before announcing our winner.

Morley, from Oregon, posted what he called “a wonderful phrase for illustrating the importance of placing modifiers directly before the right words”:

“The company’s refrigerator held microwavable lunches for 18 employees frozen in the top compartment.”

(He’s right: “frozen in the top compartment” should have followed lunches, not employees. By way of comment, I would add that unemployment beats a job with that company.)

BBo Enter recalled a dangler that gave him a good laugh when, as a teenager, he happened upon this sign:

“Leash Dogs to Protect Water Foul.”

(Is “Leash dog” a new breed of protective canine?)

Judy, from Philadelphia, posted a sentence she has remembered ever since her fourth-grade teacher asked what was wrong with it:

“Hopping from foot to foot, the crosstown bus came into view.”

(Uptown, downtown, or crosstown, what bus needs wheels when it’s got feet?)

If Judy saw buses with feet, Jeff from Munich remembers imagining balls with limbs, after a teacher more than 50 years ago wrote this on a chalkboard:

“Donna saw the ball walking by the lake.”

(“I clearly remember his 5th grade grammar lessons,” Jeff wrote, about his teacher, Mr. Sixour.)

Two more commenters sent danglers that set inanimate things a-walking. H.D. Stearman, from Grand Prairie, Texas, saw a coffin get up and make like a zombie:

“Walking past the cemetery, an open coffin frightened me.”

And Peter, from Ventnor, New Jersey, sent one that made me think “Money doesn’t just talk—it walks”:

“I found a dollar walking home.”

Bill, from Fairfax, Virginia, gamely confessed to a dangler he himself wrote. While in the Foreign Service he told an Administrative Officer about his travel plans:

“My wife and I will be flying to post with our cat in an on-board carrying cage.”

(“Ouch,” Bill said in his comment. “I hate it when they scratch!”)

Kathy, from Pennsylvania, sent one in that reminded me of some of the classified-ad classics I printed in Sin and Syntax:

“He made a table for his aunt with wooden legs.”

In the same vein, from a Lost & Found entry, is this, from Garrett in West Chester, Pennsylvania:

“Lost: Antique walking stick by an old man with a carved ivory head.”

Now, for the members of the Sin and Syntax list who rose to the challenge…

The runner-up comes from Peter Kingsley, who sent in what he called a “mangled prepositional phrase”:

“He leaped upon his horse and rode off in all directions.”

Peter’s right—the phrase doesn’t technically dangle, but it sure conjures chaos. The phrase “in all directions” makes it seem as if the front legs of the horse went north, the back legs south, the head east, and the rider—well the rider must have been really torn. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist a double entendre.) For his effort, I want to send Peter a copy of Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives by my fellow lexophile Arthur Plotnik. (Forget “awesome” and “amazing,” says the jacket copy. Here are almost 6,000 alternatives to those stale adjectives.)

David Kornelis is the winner. He posted his example in the Comments of my Opinionator essay after he sent it to me:

“This is a Hybrid Multi-channel SACD, which plays on any CD player. However, when played on an SACD player, the listener will hear the exceptional audio resolution that only a DSD recording can provide.”

David wrote that he found the quote on the cover of a CD by the South Dakota Chorale. The CD was called In Paradisum. All I can say is that the way “into paradise” is not being put on or into an audio player.

David will receive a copy of 642 Things to Write About, created by members of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and published by Chronicle Books.

Look for a different kind of book giveaway for subscribers soon, and in the meantime, feel free to add more danglers in the comments below. Also, give me your opinion: should writers worry about this kind of syntactical mistake?

In an essay called “The English Wars,” in the May 14 New Yorker, Joan Acocella summed up the epic prescriptivist-descriptivist debate by focusing on the two manuals that the linguists love to hate: H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), and William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (1918, recast in 1959). Prescriptivists can be justly accused of nit-picking, but often their main goal is clarity. I call that a pretty good goal. Most writers need some rules. On the other hand, the rules a few dudes made a hundred years ago can get in the way of writing that lives and breathes with the rest of us. I get a kick out of slang terms like “toe social,” at which men choose their dates by their piggies alone!

If you’d like to read other essays by writers as smart and sophisticated as Acocella, I happen to collect them. Back in 2001, Louis Menand wrote about Fowler himself for The New Yorker, in an essay titled “Slips of the Tongue: Before there was Fowler’s, there was Fowler.”

And earlier, closer to Oxford University Press’s publication of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (by H. W. Fowler, edited by R. W. Burchfield), lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower wrote “Elegant Variation and All That” for The Atlantic while Patricia O’Conner (author of Woe Is I), wrote “Running Afoul of Fowler” for The New York Times.

All this reading should satisfy the grammar geek in you!

What’s an author to do? No sooner do you say, “here’s what just happened in book publishing” than the earth beneath us shifts again. In the latest temblor, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and five major publishing houses of price-fixing e-books last month. Three parties settled, and two will duke it out with the DOJ. But who benefits from this contention: Consumers? Authors? Amazon? What is the overall narrative: Another painful loss for physical bookstores? A triumph of capitalism? A literary tragedy?

The suit, and the future of publishing, can only be understood by examining the e-book market, its dramatic growth, and the ways publishers have scrambled to adjust to it. So let’s start with a two-year recap of the rise of e-books before taking stock of the DOJ suit.

In April of 2010, we ran Sarah Baker’s post, “E-Z on e-books update.” It answers questions that look quaint today – “what is an e-book?” and “what is an e-reader?” – but her article is an excellent primer and, more importantly, reveals how rapidly the market is evolving.

In May 2011, Heather Ross posted an update meant for writers considering publishing their work digitally. Ross raises more daring questions  (“How are e-books priced?” and “What should I be aware of in my contract?”) and cites e-book net sales statistics (between January 2010 and January 2011, e-book net sales leapt 115.8 percent).

That trajectory of growth continues. Publishers Weekly reported a 176.6 percent growth in e-book sales in 2009, to $169.5 million. Another Publisher’s Weekly press release, from February 2012, reporting on 2011, says that “e-book sales rose 117% for the year, generating revenue of $969.9 million at the companies that report sales to the Association of American Publishers.”

Pricing models between publishers and retailers are at the center of the suit. The “agency” publishing model allowed publishers to set their own prices for e-books rather than selling them to retailers at wholesale prices. The Justice Department believes that such pricing, along with Apple’s insistence that no other retailer received terms better than its own, is collusive, illegal, and designed to shut Amazon out of part of the digital market.

On April 15, in The New York Times, David Carr wrote “Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis,” an overview of Amazon.com’s pricing tactics and models and their effect on consumers. He calls the Justice Department suit “the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ’N’ Groceries on Route 19 instead.” Authors Guild President Scott Turow penned (or keyboarded) a scathing take on the Justice Department’s proposed settlement and what it could mean for traditional bookstores, here.

Amazon is an absolute giant in the e-publishing market, both boon to consumers looking for low prices and bully to competition. The Seattle Times’ four-part series on Amazon, called “Behind the Amazon Smile,” delves into the company’s corporate practices and its relationship to publishers, authors, and its own employees. The second part of the series, “A Hammer on the Publishers” pays particular attention to Amazon’s relationship with the book industry.

Has Amazon itself acted unethically? Illegally? What about the Justice Department? Amazon’s mega-dominance makes is easy to hate, but in the Wall Street Journal Thomas Catan cogently argues that the department had no choice but to file an anti-trust suit. Amazon’s market-grabbing might be vicious, but it is probably not illegal.

{Gianmaria Franchini is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He does not own any e-books, but might be interested in reading one.}