Swam/swum, lay/lain? The answers are in the dictionary

The dictionary is gaslighting me. I know I sound crazy, but that’s just proof of gaslighting, right?

Let me explain.

For years I’ve been telling people that they never have to agonize over whether to use “swam” or “swum,” “laid” or “lain,” “drank” or “drunk,” or “dreamed” or “dreamt” because the answers are in the dictionary. But only if you know how to find them.

Most dictionaries contain instructions on how to use the dictionary. Of course, no one ever reads this section because they think they already know how to use a dictionary: Look up the word you want. Ignore those weird little schwas and other stuff after the word. Read its definition. Then continue to wonder what mysterious corner of the universe contains the answers to the “laid” vs. “lain” mystery.

Not so fast, I say.

Turn to the front of a physical dictionary or look under the Help section of an online dictionary, and you’ll find information about “inflected forms.” That term means the different forms of a word for different situations, like past tense. “Thought,” for example, is an inflected form of “think.”

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary tells you inflected forms “are covered explicitly or by implication at the main entry for the base form. These are the plurals of nouns, the principal parts of verbs (the past tense, the past participle when it differs from the past tense, and the present participle), and the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. In general, it may be said that when these inflected forms are created in a manner considered regular in English (as by adding -s or -es to nouns, -ed and -ing to verbs, and -er and -est to adjectives and adverbs) and when it seems that there is nothing about the formation likely to give the dictionary user doubts, the inflected form is not shown in order to save space.”

Catch that? For regular verbs, past forms are not shown. So an irregular verb like “swim” will have after it “swam,” indicating the simple past tense, then “swum,” the past participle. But a regular verb like “walk,” which everyone knows takes -ed for both its past tense forms, doesn’t mention it. The dictionary tells you this “by implication” — if nothing’s there, you know to use -ed.

Over the years, I’ve noticed this multiple times. When I look up regular verbs like “walk,” there are no past tense forms listed. At least, there weren’t. But suddenly, in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, under “walk” it says “walked.” After “talk” it says “talked.” After “call” it says “called.” After “realize” it says “realized.”  Those weren’t there before.

That’s all the evidence I need to prove that Merriam’s is trying to drive me crazy by making me think I’m crazy. But I am not a crackpot.

Confronted with this puzzling information, I did what any former reporter who lacked the chops to cut it as a long-term reporter would do: I contacted the source through social media asking what’s up with that? I got no answer and, true to my didn’t-cut-it-as-a-long-term-reporter skills, I gave up.

But Merriam made one fatal error. They left in that stuff in the Help section about inflected forms of regular verbs being covered “by implication” — evidence of a hasty cover-up of their gaslighting campaign. Busted.

What does all this mean for you? Two things.

First, you can easily find out that the simple past tense of “swim” is “swam,” and the past participle (the one that goes after a form of “have”) is “swum.” “Laid” is the past tense and past participle of the transitive verb “lay,” while “lain” is the past participle of the intransitive verb “lie.” It’s correct to say “yesterday he drank” but “in the past he has drunk.” Also, “dreamed” is correct but “dreamt” is also an option.

And second, your humble grammar columnist is not crazy (in any way relevant to this column).

Figures of speech

Figures of speech, like words, evolve.

Take “vicious cycle,” for example. For a solid century, there was no “vicious cycle” — at least not in published writing. Pretty much everyone who could get near a printing press agreed the expression was “vicious circle.”

The idea behind the expression, of course, is that of being stuck in a loop, a bad one. Merriam-Webster defines “vicious circle” as “a chain of events in which the response to one difficulty creates a new problem that aggravates the original difficulty.” As the 20th century dawned, “vicious circle” continued to dominate, but suddenly it had some competition. “Vicious cycle” was emerging as a contender. “Vicious circle” held onto its lead until just about a decade ago, when “vicious cycle” nosed ahead. At the same time, the original and originally correct expression “vicious circle” started to dive. I’m not optimistic about its future.

“Top up” is another term that caught my eye lately, and not in a good way. I first started seeing it in travel articles pondering whether it’s worthwhile to buy airline miles to “top up” your existing balance enough to book a flight. My whole life, the expression I heard was “top off.” According to Merriam-Webster, “top off” is a phrasal verb that has two definitions: The first is “to end (something) usually in an exciting way.” So an athlete may top off their career with a final victory, or a nice dinner can be topped off with dessert and coffee. The second definition is similar to the first: “to fill (something) completely with a liquid.” Be it a mug of coffee or a tank of gas, when it’s not quite full and you fill it all the way, you’re topping it off.

“Top up,” meanwhile, was a perfectly fine way to say “top off” if you’re British. But it wasn’t for us, I thought. We were top-off people.

Turns out that’s not quite right. “Top up” has been in print as long as “top off,” and though the American version has always been more popular in American publishing, “top up” has never been far behind.

I was wrong about that, but I was even more wrong about “You’ve got another think coming.” I couldn’t understand how anyone could make the embarrassing mistake of using “think” in this expression. Obviously, the correct version was “You’ve got another thing coming.”

I never considered the context. The expression follows a stated or implied statement of “If you think X …” so “another” makes sense because you’ve already had one think. Of course, a think is a thing. So it’s not wrong to say you’ve got another thing coming. And that’s lucky for modern English speakers, because Ngram Viewer shows that “another think coming” started to decline in popularity about 10 years ago while “another thing coming” is becoming more popular than ever — just when I was getting used to “think.”

For me, there are two takeaways from these trends. One, the language will keep changing. And two, change will continue to annoy me.

Older, skater kids

There’s a new show on Netflix that piqued my interest. Here’s how “Mid90s” is described on the streaming service: “A lonely boy escapes his troubled home life by latching on to a group of older, skater kids.”

I’m intrigued.

How did the older kids get so skate? And is one of them skater than the others —  you know, the skatest of the bunch?

English is weird. Punctuation is weird. And if you’re not careful with both, you can write something weird when you don’t mean to.

Let’s start with punctuation, in this case, the comma that singlehandedly messed up an otherwise fine show description.

A lot of people know that commas can go between adjectives in front of a noun: a nice, generous, thoughtful person. And, whether they think about it or not, they know that sometimes commas should not go between adjectives in front of a noun: a bright orange dress shirt. But few people know why, and even the experts struggle to explain it succinctly.

Here’s the Chicago Manual of Style: “As a general rule, when a noun is preceded by two or more adjectives that could, without affecting the meaning, be joined by ‘and,’ the adjectives are separated by commas. Such adjectives, which are called coordinate adjectives, can also usually be reversed in order and still make sense. If, on the other hand, the adjectives are not coordinate — that is, if one or more of the adjectives are essential to (i.e., form a unit with) the noun being modified — no commas are used.”

The Associated Press Stylebook casts it as how the adjectives “rank.”

“Use commas to separate a series of adjectives equal in rank. If the commas could be replaced by the word ‘and’ without changing the sense, the adjectives are equal: a thoughtful, precise manner; a dark, dangerous street. Use no comma when the last adjective before a noun outranks its predecessors because it is an integral element of a noun phrase, which is the equivalent of a single noun: a cheap fur coat.”

So while it’s unfortunate that there’s no clearer way of explaining this comma rule, at least you have two handy tests to choose from: try putting the word “and” between the adjectives, or try changing their order. If the sentence still makes sense, you need commas.

“Older and skater kids” is nonsense. So is “skater, older kids.”

When you write it, as the Netflix people did, “older, skater,”  it implies that “skater” is an adjective on par with “older” — that their rank is the same, that they’re coordinate.

They’re not. “Skater” doesn’t just describe the kids, it defines them. And this isn’t just because “skater” is a noun. The same is true for older Hawaiian shirt and delicious tossed salad.

The other odd thing about English that Netflix’s copy reveals has to do with the “er” ending on “skater.” As a suffix, “er” has two meanings.

It can mean more, greater, better, etc., forming a comparative adjective. You’re smart, she’s smarter. You’re late, he’s later. You’re tall, they’re taller.

In this sense, “er” is what’s called an adjective suffix because it attaches to an adjective like tall, or it’s an adverb suffix because it attaches to an adverb like fast.

But “er” can also be a noun suffix, as it is in skater. The noun suffix form has nine possible definitions. It can be someone who does a thing: a skater, a seat filler, a jogger. It can mean to have something, for example a double-decker has double decks. It can also mean a native or resident of, like a New Yorker or a New Englander.

To avoid mistakes like Netflix’s, you don’t need to think about “er” suffixes. It’s the comma that’ll get you. Try moving your adjectives around or putting “and” between them. If you end up with nonsense like “skater older kids,”  you know there’s no comma in “older skater kids.”

What's up with 're'?

A lot of language experts will tell you to avoid the word “re,” as in, “I’d like to speak to you re scheduling.” It’s pretentious, they say, to use this Latin derivative instead of good old plain English — it’s “tasteless as a gold toothpick,” according to Theodore Bernstein’s 1965 guide “The Careful Writer.”  All of us outside the legal profession should “leave this one to the lawyers,” he wrote.

Way ahead of you, Bernstein and friends. I’ve been avoiding “re” my whole life. But unfortunately, I can’t claim that my motive has been to eschew pretentiousness, humbly sidestepping every opportunity to show off my deep knowledge of this preposition and its Latin origins.

No, I avoid it because I’ve never understood “re” well enough to even feign pretentiousness. I avoid “re” not because I’m down to earth but because I’m downright intimidated.

Is it “re:” with a colon? Is the R capitalized? Can you use it in the body of a letter or email, or only in the header or subject line? If it’s an abbreviation of “regarding,” does it need a period at the end, or does a colon preclude the need for a period? And why do you sometimes see “in” before “re”? Wouldn’t that be redundant?

The answers to all these questions are surprising — at least to me. For starters “re” is not an abbreviation for “regarding.” It’s a preposition — a real word like “at,” “of” or “with.” It’s defined not as “regarding” but as “with regard to” or “in the matter of,” which makes it a subtle shade different from “regarding” in some uses.

“Re” doesn’t even share the same roots as “regarding.” It’s from a Latin noun, “res,” which meant “thing” or “matter.” That’s a clue why “in” is sometimes used before “re.” It’s like saying “in the matter of.” But the way Latin grammar worked, the “in” may be implied, anyway. So it’s hard to know whether “in re” or just “re” better captures “res” in what’s called the Latin “ablative” case. At least that’s the assessment of someone who gave up after half a day trying to understand Latin noun cases. (Ahem.)

What I do know after half a day buried in books is that, in English, the “in” is optional. One of the definitions for the preposition “re” is “in re” — that is, they mean the same thing. So you can choose.

Here’s more of what I learned about “re” in my recent column.