Time to capsize the mailbag, check the leftovers before the year checks out. Random notes like the lay-lie muddle, via Gillian Appleton: “I downloaded a relaxation app but had to delete it as the person presenting the techniques persisted in telling me to ‘lay down’. I found this confronting and not at all relaxing.” True dedication, Gillian, choosing grammatical purity over yogic serenity.
Lay is transitive, needing a direct object, just as chickens lay eggs, a waiter his table. By contrast, lie is intransitive. I lie down. Or you lay down, the past of lie, whether that’s in a hammock or cool bath, the recumbent object an optional detail. Elsewhere, readers objected to the rise of verbs as nouns – think reveal, disconnect and invite – just as others lamented nouns (goal and medal) impersonating verbs.
Still on verbs, Lawrie Robertson pondered renovate over reinstate thanks to a legal document. The issue was whether a unit’s former resident was liable to pay for one instead of the other, and how those two operations differed. Reinstate, I suggested, means to re-establish, to return X to its original position. While renovate denotes refresh, to make new again. No doubt lawyers will quibble further at higher rates.
It’s enough to make you want to lay down, or lie down. Credit: Getty Images/Maskot
Meanwhile, Judy Hungerford has been thrown by 100 per cent, the GenZ alternative to yes. “Put me out of my misery,” begs Judy. “Why waste five syllables when you can get away with one?” Emphasis in a word, as well as buying time. The Boomer equivalent is “absolutely”, if rejoinders can be generational.
Though often the reflex is farcical, where a teen might be asked if they want milk in their coffee. “100 per cent” comes the reply. So, wait, you want a glass of milk instead? Shades of the niggle shared by reader Richard Grant: “When asked for my mobile number, the response I hear after giving it is often ‘perfect’. To which I’m tempted to respond that anything less than perfect would be of little use.”
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Equally futile is a contronym, a word owning opposing meanings. Sanction, say, can mean to punish or approve. Depending on who you ask, to luck out is to hit the jackpot or rock bottom. For Lesley Hanks, another two-timer is lift, a headline regular that almost offers a bob each way. If tariffs lift, they climb. Whereas if tariffs are lifted, they’re waived. Grammar playing umpire in a sense, though the fading border seems fated for deeper confusion.
For Olivia Kerr, her quandary homes (or hones) in on that troublesome idiom. Home was the phrase’s original verb, from the mid-1700s, honouring the roosting radar of homing pigeons, reaching the key destination, just as satnavs guide motorists.
As a verb, hone boasts the same vintage, though its consequent role in the expression – to hone in – has only spread since the 1960s. Such a corruption is called an eggcorn, or logical malapropism, with honing evoking a finer focal point. Parting shot is another example, a morphing of Parthian shot, named after the Caspian horsemen who’d swivel in their saddles to fire arrows while retreating – or parting.
By fluke, that last image is Wordplay’s final shot for 2025. Your alphabet scribe is taking a spell over early January. Will he back for more? One hundred per cent.
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