Q & A Does snow lay or lie?

Until recently I had the dubious pleasure of topping the list for longest blog posts on the register of language blogs at One Stop English. It was, I have to say, the only list I topped. Seeing I no longer have to defend my title, I've decided to go the other way occasionally, and write some really short posts.

So this is the first of what I intend to be a regular series answering some of the questions googled by people who have landed up on this blog. And if you think this is just a shameless attempt to get more hits, damn right it is.

Does snow lay or lie?

Snow lies - from lie, lay, lain, lying (intransitive). We use this expression especially at the beginning of snowy weather when talking about new snow:

• Look it's snowing. Is it lying?
• No. The snow's too wet. It's not lying.

In other words, is it staying or just disappearing? But in narratives you will also see expressions like:

• Snow lay all around the house.
• The snow lay deep and thick.
• A thick blanket of snow lay between the trees.

Remember that lay here is simply the Past Simple tense of lie. It has nothing to do with the transitive verb lay - lay, laid, laid, laying. Well it does etymologically, but that's another story.

Other weather phenomena like mist and water can also lie.

• In the early mornings light patches of mist often lie in the bottom of the valley.
• After the rain storm, water lay in puddles all over the road.
• A thick fog has been lying over the area all morning.
• The sun was hidden all day behind the low-lying stratus clouds.

Related posts and links

• Lie, lay, lie - confusing verbs
• Snow patrol - Chasing Cars - Why I think they got it right.
• OneStopEnglish - blog lists

WhomWatch #2 - Sometimes the comments are the best part

For the second post in the WhomWatch series I have decided to soften the tone a bit. I'm not going to rant at anyone this time. Instead I would like to discuss two newspaper articles I've read recently, one in the voice of liberal America, the New York Times, and the other in the voice of conservative England, the Daily Telegraph.

Awesome revisited

It seems I'm not the only one to regret the passing of the sense of sheer wonder that the word awesome used to have before it became 'the contemporary superlative of choice'. Jemima Kiss at the Guardian (whose quote that is) apparently has a similar feeling of loss.

She, like me, evokes the Grand Canyon as being something truly worthy of the description, and also sees the technological industry as the main culprits in its overuse.

And also like me, she wonders what word people will have available when they see something which truly is awesome.

See:

• My original post - Nowadays awesome is not quite as awesome as it used to be.
• The Guardian - SXSW 2011: A crash guide to 'awesome', by Jemima Kiss

Song lesson - 'She's got issues' by the Offspring

This song is rich in contemporary expressions to do with relationships and personal psychology, such as: to have issues, baggage, closure, validation, as well as alluding to possible past incest. It also has some interesting verb phrases and a couple of grammar points.

1. Pre-listening vocabulary matching exercises
2. Lyrics gapfill exercises
3. Grammar exercises 1 - if type questions
   Grammar exercises 2 - constructions with I wish and if only

Random thoughts about If I were a boy, You've got another thing coming and if clauses.

Since I wrote my last post I've been thinking about these lines from 'If I were a boy'

If you thought I would wait for you
You thought wrong

When I originally saw this, I was thinking 2nd Conditional, because I only paid attention to the first line. It was only later that I realised it didn't quite fit that pattern. In fact it's a good example of a another pattern that we sometimes use, especially when we think somebody is wrong in their opinions or thinking. This pattern is especially used with these verbs:

think, expect, believe, reckon, suppose, imagine

Here are a couple of exercises, involving some idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs, to illustrate this pattern.

The question of whether (or not) to use whether (or not)

It can sometimes be confusing when it's better to use whether or when we can use if. Random Idea English takes a look with some exercises.

Song lesson - conditionals in If I were a Boy

One of the good things about blog stats is that you can see what search terms are being used by the people who land up on your blog. A couple of days ago, somebody from Winnipeg in Canada googled 'teaching conditionals using If I were a boy'. I had included a line from the song in an exercise about conditionals in songs, but thought that perhaps it was worth a closer look.

And it proved to be a very interesting song indeed from a grammatical viewpoint. So I've decided to have a go at doing a little lesson based on it.