LANGUAGE PET
PEEVES 2 LANGUAGE PET
PEEVES 2
Transitive versus intransitive verbs: remember those terms from high school? The former take direct objects and the latter do not. Errors of this nature, then, can cause no end of hilarity for those of us “in the know.”
I was reading a Pocket Books-published Star Trek novel, and encountered the phrase, “…the viewer had raised out of its slot….” Instant mirth overcame me, and I sputtered aloud, “Raised what? Daffodils? Windows?? What??? The viewer had risen out of its slot, you…you…you…!”
I don’t know; maybe bad grammar was invented to give the rest of us sources of amusement.
Anyway, here they are, folks:
Intransitive: rise, rose, risen.
Transitive: raise, raised, raised.
Here’s another fun one: lay and lie. The former is transitive and the latter is intransitive. Example: I lie on the bed, but I lay the laundry on the bed.
Intransitive: lie, lay, lain.
Transitive: lay, laid, laid.
Admittedly, it gets a bit tricky between the preterit (simple past tense) intransitive and the present tense transitive, but one must simply distinguish the two by context.
Here’s the funniest part (or perhaps the most frightening part, depending upon one’s point of view): whoever programmed “grammar checker” didn’t know the difference either, because the silly thing kept flagging me as I typed this, and tried to insist that I change my correct grammar examples to incorrect ones instead. I guess that I’ve stopped wondering why such idiocy gets into print: the publishers no longer have sense enough to employ proofreaders. Sigh!
