I'm hijacking my own post with a rant. I'll get back to the above picture, but first, there's this. I'm a grammar nerd. I love it, and I know quite a bit about it. There are a lot of somewhat obscure rules and conventions that I know. I'm not sure why. I guess it's just something I've always been interested in, so I absorbed and remembered every little rule that I learned in my schooling. And in my adult life, when there has been some obscure or complex rule I didn't know that well, I have looked it up and tried to learn it completely. This has made me a good proofreader, and I've been called on to do that by people in different departments during my work career. I just really enjoy grammar and punctuation and how they give a structure that can be used to convey information clearly. I like everything from gerunds to infinitives to participles to conjugation. What's really dry to most people is very interesting to me. Although, there are some things I'm a rebel about. The first is actually really not that rebellious. It's the rule that you can't end a sentence with a preposition. I've already done it in this post. Even though we were all taught this as kids, it's basically an archaic rule and really only matters in formal papers. In informal writing, such as blogs, texts, and emails, it doesn't apply, because it sounds ridiculous and pretentious to reword things to accommodate the rule: "Although there are some things about which I'm a rebel". The other thing I ignore is a particular rule where punctuation is to be included inside the quotation marks. In some situations, it makes no sense. I started to write out an example of this, but I realized no one besides me cares about it, so I deleted it. But the point is that there are a few rules that I'm pretty relaxed about. But there are others for which I really try to be accurate. One is who/whom. That's a tough one, and although I have a decent grasp on it in general, I occasionally find myself looking up which one to use in certain complex sentences. Another one is lay/lie. People often get this one wrong, and I wasn't sure about it when I needed to use it in a sentence early in my professional career, so I looked it up and learned that "lay" is used when you are acting on an object: "I'm laying down this book on the table." and "lie" is used when the person is doing it to himself or herself: "I don't feel well, so I'm going to go lie down". So ever since then, I've been able to use those correctly. But today, when writing this post, I wanted to talk about how I was going to lie down on the couch, but I was going to write it in the past tense. I couldn't remember the past tense of lie in this sense (which is of course different from the "lie" that means to say something untrue; that one has a past tense we all know of "lied"), so I looked it up. I was somewhat dismayed to find that the past tense of "lie" is "lay". Ugh. Seriously? So an example sentence would be, "Yesterday Alex lay on our bed and then puked on it." That seems terribly wrong (his propensity to barf on everything also seems wrong, but we've come to expect that). It looks like a typo. But it's not. There's no good reason for this. I get that English is largely arbitrary, and of course there are exceptions to many rules, but usually the exceptions are not such that the past tense of a word is the same as the present tense of another word that is extremely similar! But some guy somewhere a long time ago decided on that, and it's dumb. And he's dumb. Or maybe he's a smart guy who just made a dumb decision, Or maybe he knew it was an awful choice, and he was a bad person who knew it would be used for centuries to come, so he intentionally chose something stupid and annoying to frustrate English speakers until the end of time. I don't know. But it's not good. Nonetheless, I will abide by it, so here's the very short post that I was originally going to write, but now with the correct grammar.
The kids were pretty tired after our bike ride. I was too, so after we came in from the garage I lay down on the couch, which caused the kids to want to lie down with me. Joshua and Clara climbed up on the couch and snuggled up with me, which made for a crowded couch, but I'm always happy to snuggle with my little ones, so I was glad to have them with me.
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