stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007 From: SW London (UK) Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: EvilGenie Nope one is not ''lying'' in the street. One of the basics taught in the English language is that any form of the word lie always refers to an untruth. Hence, the person would be telling lies in the street if lying in the street. The proper terminology *is* laying in the street. If one is lying, one is telling a lie in any form of the word such as, ''I am going to lie down.'' If one is prone or supine or about to be then the word used is always a form of lay. The words lay and lie are mutually exclusive terms. Sorry, I could not help myself. This is one of my pet peeves. As to what others have said I think that we all can be lazy at times with our writing especially on a message board. I, however, am one of those people who find things like dominate in place of Dominant highly irksome. In fact, I just had to correct myself three times as I couldn't type dominate used as a noun. I kept typing dominant. So what about context? 'Lie' is not just a verb about spreading falsehood or untruths, but it is also a static verb like stand, sit, appear, etc. 'Lie' and 'lay' are synonyms. Just like 'while' and 'whilst'. Just like 'lie' and 'deceive'. 'Lie' has more than one meaning. This is why context is so important, because English is a language where words can have more than one meaning. 'Get' for example has eighteen different meanings, 'set' as many as fifty eight different meanings, and so on. This makes English possibly the easiest second language to learn in a way, because you don't have to speak it correctly to be understood, 'I go shop' is just as clear as 'I am going to the shop'. But it is also the hardest because many words can have different meanings and because English is used as a native language by many different people throughout the world, connotations of a word may vary and the context may differ. Compare the different ways in which an American uses the word 'sure' from how a Brit uses it. Think of the many different connotations of the word 'fuck' for example. Not all languages are like this. Polish for example has one word one meaning. This is why Polish has 96 different verbs which mean 'to shit', more than any other language.
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