June 30, 2025

'That' and 'which'

TOPICS: GRAMMAR, THAT VS. WHICH

Here’s a little reminder about “that” and “which”: Editing styles have some strict rules on their usage, but they’re not universal grammar rules, just a style thing.

Here’s the rule, according to the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style: “which” can’t be used for restrictive clauses. Only “that” can introduce restrictive clauses.

Restrictive clauses narrow down the things they refer to. Compare:

The hats that have feathers sell the best

with

The hats, which have feathers, sell the best.

In the first example, the clause beginning with “that” actually narrows down which hats we’re talking about. Only the ones that have feathers are being discussed. In the second example, all the hats are being referred to. The “which” clause lets us know that they all have feathers.

So a restrictive clause restricts — narrows down or specifies — its subject. A nonrestrictive clause does not: It can be lifted right out of the sentence without losing specificity of your subject.

And AP and Chicago agree that you can’t use “which” for a restrictive clause. 

“The hats which have feathers sell the best.” That, according to the style guides, is wrong because the clause is supposed to be restrictive. How do we know that the writer meant this clause to be restrictive? The lack of commas. Commas set off nonrestrictive information. To the lack of commas around the clause makes it restrictive.

There’s some logic at the heart of the style rule: Most American English speakers usually use “which” only for nonrestrictive clauses, leaving the other job to “that.” You can also see that keeping these two separate can clear up the potential ambiguity of sentences like “The hats which have feathers will sell best.” (That is, if you doubt the writer’s punctuation skills, you couldn’t be sure whether she meant only the hats that have feathers sell best or whether she meant all the hats sell better than other merchandise and oh, by the way, they all have feathers.)

But unless you’re editing in one of those two styles, you don’t have to worry about this. In my experience, most people manage “that” and “which” clauses well, leaving no question as to what they meant.

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June 23, 2025

Not grieving the demise of the semicolon

TOPICS: GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, SEMICOLON, SEMICOLON USE IS DOWN

Semicolon use is down, and its slide is making headlines. In the U.S., these punctuation marks are appearing in published books about half as often as they did 25 years ago. The same trend can be seen in the U.K., where only 11% of students surveyed reported that they regularly use semicolons.

Some people say this decline is a tragedy. But before you take their word for it, consider who’s not saying this: readers.

You can listen to a thousand laments about the death of the semicolon and never hear a single complaint from the reader’s point of view. No one says they would have enjoyed a piece of writing more if it contained more semicolons. No one says they struggled to understand short sentences because they weren’t mashed together into longer, more complicated sentences. No one searches an e-book sample to make sure it has enough semicolons before they buy it.

Semicolon love is purely a supply-side phenomenon. Here’s one example of an impassioned pro-semicolon argument: “I’d be reading an article about a flood in Mexico, which would lead me to thinking about a wedding I once went to in Cancun, which would lead me to thinking about marriage, which would lead to gay marriage, which would lead to the presidential election, which would lead to swing states, which would lead to a fascinatingly terrible country song called ‘Swing’ — and I’d be three songs into a Trace Adkins YouTube marathon before I’d glance back down at the newspaper on the table. It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful.”

Honoring the movement of mind. Whose mind? Not the reader’s.

I don’t know about you, but when I read a story, an article or an essay, I’m not in it to honor the author. The very idea runs counter to the writer’s job, which is to transform information and ideas into something valuable to the reader. To honor the reader’s needs over one’s own.

Most of the semicolons I see in my editing work amount to simple showing off. The writers, it seems, are so proud they know how to use semicolons they forget it’s not about them. One writer I’ve been editing for years puts exactly one semicolon in almost every feature article she writes. What are the odds that somewhere between 50 and 100 articles she’s submitted all needed exactly one semicolon? Far lower than the odds that she just wanted to use one.

Semicolons between independent clauses are unnecessary about 99% of the time. Yes, they show that the clauses are closely related. But would that be any less clear if each clause was its own sentence?

Semicolons are silliest in paragraphs containing just two clauses. Those clauses’ relationship to each other is already crystal clear. What is gained by making those two sentences into one?

Besides connecting independent clauses, semicolons have another job: organizing lists too unwieldy for commas to manage. Usually, this means lists of things that contain their own commas: “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa; Butte, Montana; and Santa Fe, New Mexico.”

In these cases, semicolons are more than justified. They’re essential. But they’re also dangerous. They make it easy to cram too many bits of information into a single sentence instead of doling out the facts in more easily digestible short sentences. “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa, where they visited a museum; Butte, Montana, which is stunningly beautiful; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they had fun shopping for one-of-a-kind works by local artisans.”  The semicolon lets you do that, but that doesn’t mean it’s your friend.

Anytime you’re tempted to lean on semicolons to make sense of your sentence, try breaking it up into shorter sentences instead. It’s the right thing to do for your reader.

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June 16, 2025

ChatGPT can't do me

TOPICS: CHATGPT, GRAMMAR, WRITING

At a time when people refuse to believe doctors, journalists and anyone who says we went to the moon, everyone accepts the AI industry’s claims about AI. It’s genius. It’s going to revolutionize life as we know it. It’s going to render all us workers obsolete so we’ll be unemployed and homeless but at least we’ll be wowed by TikToks of Jennifer Lawrence talking through Steve Buscemi’s face.

First on the chopping block, they say: editors and writers. Like me.

To check the ETA of my bleak future, I asked ChatGPT to write a grammar book in the style of June Casagrande.

The software cheerily obliged, promising to “channel my inner June Casagrande and create a grammar book that’s fun, fierce, and friendly — just like ‘Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies.’” Minus the cash advance for me, of course. Minus even the cover price of two books I wrote that another AI program literally stole, according to an Atlantic magazine database.

The ChatGPT book begins: “Let’s face it: grammar has trust issues. Not because it’s sneaky or complicated — though we’ll admit, it has its moods — but because you were probably introduced to it by someone who thought diagramming sentences was a fun Friday activity. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.”

Smooth, well-structured, accessible. At first, the writing seems impressive. But wait, “trust issues”? ChatGPT meant that people don’t trust grammar, which itself is a little off. But to “have trust issues” means to be incapable of trusting others. So the first sentence doesn’t make sense.

The word “complicated” is also odd. Being complicated doesn’t undermine trust, exactly. “Spoiler alert” means something you have yet to learn, not something you learned decades ago. Then there’s “we’ll admit.”  Who’s “we”? This isn’t an article in a sassy magazine in which the writer is speaking on behalf of the editorial staff. This is a book by just one author — an author who has written five books and over 1,000 columns without once writing in the plural first person. (Nice job channeling me, ChatGPT.)

“We” appears a lot in the first few pages, like after saying grammar has a bad reputation, adding: “We’re going to clear that up.” Then, while talking about the voice in your head that makes you fear grammar, adding: “To that voice we say: shut up.”

Check every book on your shelf and you probably won’t find a single one written in the plural first person — and definitely not if the book has just one author.

Then, this “intelligence” gets even less intelligent by switching to the singular first person a few pages later: “I’m going to give you the tools you need.”

ChatGPT’s manuscript contained lots of illogical statements, like the example sentence “My cat screams at 3 a.m.,” the assertion that verbs are “the Beyonce of grammar” (with no explanation why) and, my favorite, this bit about comma splices: “Grammar says, ‘not today, Satan.’”

ChatGPT got facts wrong, too. It said the “are” in “We are never getting back together” is a linking verb. It’s not. It’s an auxiliary verb.

I could go on. But in the middle of writing this column, and I swear this is true, I was given a freelance assignment to revise a short video script written by AI and to “make it sound more natural.”

The script wasn’t just unnatural sounding. It was illogical, misguided and utterly clueless about what to focus on. It boasted at length about an AI writing program that could take “P.R. pitches” and instantly transform them into newspaper articles.

That might sound great to P.R. firms making the pitches, but this script was promoting a technology to benefit newspapers and their readers — oblivious to the fact that journalism doesn’t mean printing whatever P.R. firms want.

I rewrote the whole script, emphasizing the important work reporters do and how the new AI tools could support their journalism. The editor who assigned me the project wrote back, “Your version is SO GOOD” (emphasis hers).

I’m still reeling from the irony. A human writer did an objectively better job than AI at writing advertising copy to promote … an AI writing program.

So the next time you hear tech billionaires boasting about AI products destined to change life as you know it, remember their own words: Not today, Satan.

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June 9, 2025

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

TOPICS: DICTIONARIES, GRAMMAR, past participles

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).

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June 2, 2025

Figures of speech

TOPICS: ANOTHER THINK COMING ANOTHER THING COMING, TOP UP TOP OFF, VICIOUS CYCLE VICIOUS CIRCLE

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.

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May 26, 2025

Older, skater kids

TOPICS: comma, COMMAS BETWEEN ADJECTIVES, GRAMMAR

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.”

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May 19, 2025

What's up with 're'?

TOPICS: GRAMMAR

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.

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May 12, 2025

A flock of birds fly or a flock of birds flies?

TOPICS: GRAMMAR, SUBJECT VERB AGREEMENT

Subject-verb agreement is usually pretty easy. But even the most grammar-savvy people can get confounded by sentences like these:

A team of rivals was/were meeting the statehouse.

A bunch of whiners is/are affecting morale.

A flock of birds fly/flies by every day.

Everyone knows that a team was meeting but rivals were meeting. Everyone knows that a bunch is affecting but whiners are affecting. And everyone knows that a flock flies but birds fly.

But when noun phrase contains a singular noun and a plural noun, things can get pretty confusing. How do you know which noun should govern the verb?

Actually, the answer is easier than most would guess. You just take your pick. It’s up to you.

When your subject is a noun phrase with more than one noun, like “a team of rivals,” either one can "do" something. That is, either noun can get a verb. So choosing the verb depends only on which one of the nouns most seems to you like the one performing the action of the verb.

If you think the focus is more on the individual rivals than the whole team, you can write “A team of rivals were.” If you think it's more about the team, you can write “A  team of rivals was.”

There really is no right or wrong way. And your own ear is by far your best guide.

However, I have a way of looking at these structures that may help.

Every noun phrase — a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, a flock of birds — has a head noun. Now, recall that a prepositional phrase is a preposition like “of” plus its object, which is always a noun or pronoun.  The "of rivals" and "of whiners" are prepositional phrases within the larger noun phrase.

The job of a prepositional phrases is to *modify.* They act sort of like adjectives or adverbs, depending on where they’re placed and what they point to. In a team of rivals, a bunch of whiners, and ˆ, the “of” phrases are all modifying nouns (team, bunch, and ˆ). So they’re really functioning like adjectives of those nouns. That’s how we know that team, bunch, and flock are the head nouns in their respective noun phrases.

Now, there’s no rule that says that the head noun gets the verb. There’s no reason nouns in the prepositional phrases can’t be doing some action. But I give head nouns a little more authority. As a default, I figure the head noun should get first stab at governing the verb. Only if it sounds funny do I make the verb agree with the object of the preposition.

So how would I write our three example sentences? Let’s see …

a team of rivals were (I feel that the rivals here are more important than the team.)

a bunch of whiners are (Ditto. Whiners seem to rule this noun phrase.)

a flock of birds flies (Here, I think the emphasis is on the whole flock.)

But if you disagree, your opinion is as valid as mine.

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May 5, 2025

Comma after a short introductory phrase

TOPICS: GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION

I got an e-mail from a reader named Mike who had a question about the sentence “Soon I will go to the office,” which I had used as an example in a piece I wrote. Mike wanted to know “Shouldn't there be a comma after soon?”

Sure. Or not. Whatever.

A comma after a short introductory word, phrase, or clause, I told him, is optional. So in "Soon I will go to the office," no comma is needed.

“On Tuesday I will go to the office.” “On Tuesday, I will go to the office.”

You could go either way on these. It depends solely on which way you, the writer, feel best conveys the way you want it to come across.

But the longer the introductory matter, the greater the likelihood a comma will help.

“On the third Tuesday of the month, I go to the office.”

Technically you could skip the comma in the sentence. But I wouldn’t.

“On the third Tuesday of every month that ends in the letter Y, I go to the office.”

In this one, by the time you get to the main clause (“I go”), you’re in so deep that it’s hard to remember a main clause is even coming. So in that case, I’m guess that about 99% of editors would agree a comma is needed.

It’s just one of many areas of the language in which good judgment reigns supreme.

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April 28, 2025

What's the past tense of 'belie'?

TOPICS: BELIE, BELIED, GRAMMAR, PAST TENSE OF BELIE

You probably don’t read a lot of books written in the 1820s. But if you did, you’d see the word “belie” a lot more. According to Google Ngram Viewer, in the early 1800s, “belie” appeared in books about four times as often as it does now.

Maybe that’s why I find the word a little intimidating. I never use it, partly because its definition is confusing, but mostly because its past tense is terrifying.

Today I belie, yesterday I belay? Belaid? Belied? And what about in its -ing form? Beling? Belieing? I never know. That’s ironic when you consider how well-versed I am in the past forms of “lie” and “lay.”  Today I lie, yesterday I lay, in the past I have lain. Today I lay the book on the table, yesterday I laid the book on the table, in the past I have laid the book on the table. I’ve written about “lie” and “lay” so many times I no longer have to look them up.

But for “belie” … well, better to just avoid the word altogether than to botch its past tense. At least, that’s how I’ve been operating. That changes today, starting with some good news for anyone who’s ever struggled to figure out the past form of a verb: Definite answers — not just opinions that amateurs post on the internet — are always handy.

Open any major dictionary, digital or physical, turn to any irregular verb, and the first thing you see after the entry word will tell you how to conjugate it in every form. For example, in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, after the entry for “begin,” you see in bold “began, begun, beginning.”

Dictionaries list the simple past tense, “began,” first, followed by the past participle, “begun.” The easiest way to understand past participles is to think of them as the forms that go with “have”: I have begun. For a lot of verbs, there’s no difference between the past participle and the regular past tense, which is why you say, “I laid the book on the table” and also “I have laid the book on the table.” In those cases, the dictionary lists only the one past form, “laid,” indicating that it serves as both.

For past forms of “belie,” Merriam-Webster’s lists only “belied.” So that’s the past tense, “Her gentleness belied her strength,” and the past participle, “Her gentleness has belied her strength.” Not as difficult as I feared. The progressive participle, “belying,” seems pretty easy now that I realize the obvious: that “belie” is more closely related to the “lie” that means to deceive than to the “lie” that means to recline. And we all know how to conjugate that type of lying: Today I lie, yesterday I lied, in the past I have lied, I am lying. “Belie” mirrors that.

The definition of “belie,” though, is another matter. It’s confusing.

The main definition is to give a false impression of something, as in Merriam’s example “Her gentleness belies her strength.” But the secondary definition is “to show something to be false or wrong,” as in, “The evidence belies their claims of innocence.”

In other words, it can mean to conceal a truth or to reveal a truth.

Some experts disavow this second definition. “The word does not mean ‘to disclose or reveal,’ as is sometimes thought,” writes Garner’s Modern American Usage. “That is, some writers wrongly think of it in a sense almost antithetical to sense 1.”

It’s always unfortunate when a word has a secondary definition that contradicts its main definition. (Read the full dictionary entry for the word “literally” and you’ll see what I mean.) So even though “belie” is easy to put in the past tense, I’ll continue not using it in any tense.

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