16 December 2013

Banned Books: A Tiny Rant (And Not the One You Expect)

Ellen received a package from a provincial program that promotes reading for children.  Wonderful!  It contained a free cloth bag and two board books.  Wonderful!  I'm all about the books and the literacy and the reading to babies.  Wonderful!  Except then I actually started reading one of the board books and it's not wonderful.  I'm almost certain it was included in the package because it's based on a song by a Canadian singer, but the book/song is grammatically incorrect.  The first lines are Lay Down / Lay Down / Lay Down for the night.  And as we all know, because we took Modern Usage from a tweed jacket wearing professor and because we were tested and graded on our ability to correctly use the verbs to lie and to lay, you don't lay down.  You lie down.  You lay down a book.  You lay down a gun.  You lay down the law.

I read the book to The Bairn, but I changed all the incorrect grammar.  Clearly, though, this is going to have to be the first banned book in our house, because only three people in the world still care about the difference between lay/lie, and if I keep the book here, other people, who don't care about transitive verbs (like Steve), will just read the book and then The Bairn will be all confused and I'm already waging the pronunciation battle at home anyway, which is enough.

Now I'm going to lay my baby in her swing and lie down on the couch.

3 comments:

CSIowa said...

Unfortunately, the only appropriate place for it is the dustbin. You certainly can't give it to the poor. The poor have enough problems without having bad grammar reinforced at them from birth.

Lunicrax said...

MB, you are awesome!!! :D exactly these kind of things really bug me too (although mainly in swedish, I still don’t know all the english subtleties, and it’s not making it easier that people make the mistakes all teh time!). Excellent post.

eliana23 said...

Fight the good battle! And CSIowa is right.

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