I don’t get nauseous. I’ve never received a kudo. And I never, ever lay on my yoga mat.
That’s because I’m old. I acquired the English language way back in the mid-twentieth century, when people read magazines and looked up things in the encyclopedia or the phone book and when cool was cool, never rad or amazing.
Get nauseous? Bestow a kudo? Lay down for a nap? Puh-leez! my mid-century sensibility wants to shout. It’s lie down for a nap! It’s kudos. It’s nauseated.
The Grammar Geek Learns to Be More Wordie, Less Grammando
Linguist and University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan would like me to calm down. Be less of a stickler — less of a grammando — and more of a patient, joyful observer of the ever-changing English language — a wordie.
I’m working on it, Professor!
But accepting changes in one’s mother tongue is tough. It’s not called a mother tongue for nothing. It’s what we heard and what we echoed at the knees of mothers (and fathers?).
We hold those mothers and fathers dear, most of us, and so, deep down, we hold the language — the music of it, the poetry — also dear. “Your tummy hurts?” My mother would say. “Go lie down.”
Later, a series of teachers — elementary school, high school — drummed the lie-lay distinctions into me and my classmates. Some of us, and I for one, listened.
My mother is gone, and so probably are all those conscientious teachers of English. I am left now with a bunch of 40-somethings at the gym — the Pilates teacher, the spin teacher, the yoga teacher — who want me to lay on my mat.
Crunches and Bridge — While Lying on My Mat
It’s bad enough I’m about to do twenty crunches and twenty bridges with leg lifts. Can’t I just please do them while lying on my mat?
But the English language, like all languages — and like the world around us — is changing, Professor Curzan reminds us in her book, “Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words.”
When making decisions about grammar and usage, “right and wrong are usually not the best terms to use,” she writes. “Sometimes we’re witnessing a change in progress, which doesn’t make the new form ‘wrong.'”
A change in progress? Yep. All around me I hear “lie” giving way to “lay.”
I also hear lovely, well-bred ladies declaring themselves “nauseous” when, actually, it’s the stinky thing, the poop, that’s nauseous, not the nice person nauseated by a whiff of it.
As for kudos, once in a while, the grammar geek will spot a writer Facebooking a fellow writer a single kudo, which can’t be done. The word kudos comes from the Greek. It’s an abstract noun meaning glory. Kudos cannot be doled out in bits and pieces, one by one. It has to be given in one, great, generous, boundless mass.
Grammar Is a Lot Like Life
Grammar and usage are a lot like life, I’m finding. Things keep changing on you. Friends move away. Your favorite TV show gets cancelled. Incandescent lights are replaced with LEDs. Somebody demos a big chunk of the White House without giving you and your fellow Americans a chance to say good-bye. You’re asked to lay on your yoga mat by agile young instructors who will still be getting up and down from their mats twenty years from now when your ashes are parked and immobile in the cemetery across the bay.
Professor Curzon recommends picking and choosing your words and your grammar habits. So I’ve decided to go of the lost causes. But hold on to my oldies but goodies. We have choices, writes Curzan, go ahead and make them.
Kudos — Giving It Gloriously
And so, I’m letting go of the lay-lie thing. I will lie on my yoga mat, but I won’t object if somebody else in the room is laying on theirs. And I won’t get nauseated in the presence of people who claim to be nauseous.
As for kudos as an abstract noun — that’s a keeper. If I am going to throw praise a writer friend’s way, I’m going to throw a mess of it. I’m going to throw it gloriously.
More on Professor Curzon at, “Linguist Anne Curzon: Grammar That’s Funner Than Ever.” More on life and grammar at, “In the Garden With the Grammar Geek: Is It Ever OK to Use the Passive Voice?”