1. It took a while to get the kitchen cleaned up after last night's family dinner, but that's primarily because I like to take my time, get things done in stages, and not try to get everything done at once.
Once I was pretty much done with clean up, I settled into the Vizio room and enjoyed another matinee movie.
I think in one of our ZOOM meetings, the movie Operation Mincemeat came up. It's a WWII spy movie that tells the story of an elaborate deception the British carried out to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies were attacking in one place when they actually attacked another.
I had fun watching this movie as the story explored different relationships between the characters working on this deception and as the complex nature of this operation got more and more tricky.
2. This evening, after a delicious pasta dinner for the second night in a row, I tuned into Bill Davie's Tuesday evening Poetry Break, live on Facebook.
Bill read a few of his fresh off the press journal poems (is that right--I think this is what he called them) and then spent the rest of the evening reading poems from the mailbag. Listeners to Bill's Poetry Break send him requests, asking him to read poems they enjoy, and some listeners send in poems of their own. The poems Bill read were superb. I especially enjoyed hearing Walt Whitman's lines about animals.
I also enjoyed the one dry martini I stirred up to sip on while listening to Bill read.
3. So, yesterday a friend wrote to me about "lie" and "lay" and said, "How about the past tense?"
Oh, my!
This problem came up at family dinner Monday night. I think it was Debbie who said that a lot of the confusion about "lie" and "lay" has to do with how irregular these verbs are.
It's almost mean.
The past tense of "lie" is "lay". That's right! And the past tense of "lay" is "laid".
So if you were tired yesterday and told someone about it, if you wanted to be correct, you would say, "Yesterday, I lay down all afternoon and rested."
If you said, "I laid down", well, it's back to the fact that "lay/laid" is always accompanied by a direct object and if you say you "laid down" you are saying you took the stuffing, the down, out of a pillow and covered something with it.
So, "Yesterday we laid the carpet in our living room" is correct.
"Gibbs was tired after playing fetch the ball so he laid down" is incorrect.
I realize many/most speakers of English don't care.
I also realize that these distinctions will one day probably disappear as "lie" and "lay" are more and more chronically misused. That's the way things go.
But, I enjoy writing about "lie" and "lay", so I thought I'd go ahead, at my friend's request, and continue the discussion I began yesterday.
Not as a cranky old man.
But as an old man who finds this stuff fun.
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