Meanderings

The other evening, while dining with a few friends, I began to lament the loss of gender distinction that has crept into our speech.  It seems that we no longer have heroines, or actresses, or waitresses.  (Of course, in the dining room in which I was making my comments, we no longer had waiters either.  We had gone through a period of being served by “Waitpersons,” a clumsy oaf of a term fortunately short-lived, and other locutions.  They seem to have settled now on “Dining Staff,” though I couldn’t be sure of that.  We all still use the unisex term Waiters).

One of my companions took issue with me.  ”No,” she said.  ”We still say actress and heroine.”  ”You and I may do that,” I remarked,”but the public in general does not.”  She appeared unconvinced.  The day on which this discussion was taking place happened to be the day on which an Army medical officer killed a group of fellow-soldiers in Fort Hood, and was thought to have himself been taken down by the gunfire of a policewoman, though there was later doubt about this.

The evening TV news displayed a number of commentators all of whom classified the policewoman as a hero.  The New York Times next day echoed this, quoting several officials who’d characterized the policewoman as a hero.  I printed the article and showed it to my doubting friend.  ”Q.E.D.” I said.

Another of my lamentations concerns the misuse of the word “laying.”  A few years ago in Florida I was conducting rehearsals of excerpts from an opera.  The phrase “lying on his bed” occurred several times, and the young soprano, schooled in the current linguistic error, kept substituting the word “laying” for “lying.”  This assault on our mother tongue irritated me, and I kept correcting her, pointing out that laying in most instances is what hens do.  She agreed, but the habit proved too strong; in the performance she loudly declaimed that “he was laying on his bed.”

Without going into all the technicalities, let me quote the usage in the song: “Lay that pistol down, Babe, Lay that pistol down!”  This is quite correct, being the imperative mood.  And another deathless ditty explains:  ”I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my back in my bed while I cry over you.” In fact the distinctions can be clarified by this phrase:  ”I was lying on my bed when I laid down the pistol.”   Or “Lay down that pistol, or you’ll be lying on your back!”

Pondering over why the American version of English has wandered so far from the Mother Tongue, I have at least one answer.  America has, through the years, welcomed thousands of immigrants whose mother tongue was anything but English.  Learning the new language empirically rather than academically, they quite naturally made grammatical errors that, with repetition, eventually became standard usage.  Lexicographers are a spineless lot; if any word becomes common enough in normal speech, no matter how incorrect linguistically, they’ll include it in the next edition of their dictionary.  Eventually, the original, correct word, languishing from lack of use, is either printed in brackets as an afterthought  with the italicized comment arch., meaning archaic, or eliminated from the dictionary altogether.  Shakespeare had it right:  ”The old order changeth, yielding place to new…”  Not always, I fear, for the better.

Lord of Ridley