Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay
   Richard Lederer & Richard Dowis
  1999 St. Martin's Press
    ISBN: 0312203632


& that's no lie -- Practical Advice for the Grammatically Challenged is a useful & authoritative as well as a fun read all about the world's most wonderful & perplexing language -- English.

The authors write that “Rickety English pervades the speech and writing even of educated men and women.” They cite a variety of notables slipping on the thin ice of nominative pronouns.

Lederer & Dowis bring to bear their playful & instructive wit on those elusive fundamentals such as the syntax, the apostrophe, transitive verbs, the common comma & the myriad errors to which we fall heir.

Do catch their rendition of Much ado about sexism -- it will get you funnybone in a right old pickle, if sexism itself hasn't already!

“Sleeping Dogs will serve the reader well as a quick-reference guide to preventing some of these errors.” It also clears up the confusion between words such as cite & site; this & that(really!); raise & raze; turgid & turbid; persons & people; prone & supine; preventive & preventative; continuous & continual & a whole raft more of pesky homophones upon which we frequently flounder in the streams of our consciousness.

I read out loud to my Webmaster this quote: '...President Andrew Jackson once blew his stack while trying to compose a presidential paper. “It's a damned poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word,” he thundered.” Enter George Washington & Dan Quayle. Webmaster, notorious for his spelling disability, howled!

This is no dry & brain-numbing text book of the dos & don'ts within this mongrel of a tongue. Lederer & Dowis allow their quick & punny wit to show, continually -- often when we need it the most, as a comedic tickle among all the serious mind-boggling.

“As verbs, lie and lay are exceedingly tricky,
Like a spider web -- subtle and shiny and sticky:
You can say that you lay on the grass yesterday,
But you must be a hen if today's when you lay.”

During my childhood one of my daily chores was to lay the table -- even though it was a glossy oval of polished mahogany, I certainly was never allowed to lie upon it. In America I set tables which eliminates any confusion -- no wonder I emigrated!

In the beginning Lederer & Dowis put to rest this confusion, I think; along with how we misuse me & I & whom & who. They also banish the wicked which in favor of the good fairy that & give us a workout about no-no's or double negatives & collective guilt -- nouns requiring plurality in verbs -- such as a couple who do/does something.

There was a little verse I learnt/learned when I was very young:

A centipede was happy quite
until a toad in fun, said:
“Pray which leg goes after which.”
Which worked his mind to such a pitch,
he lay distracted in a ditch,
considering how to run.

I was doing just fine in my usual grammatically rehabilitated lope until I started Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay -- now I feel like that centipede, worrying over every word I use! Human potential movement instructors used to say that being in a state of confusion implied growth. I inferred that it meant -- gee willakers -- which word means what? “The person speaking does not infer; he implies. The person listening does not imply; she infers.” Go figure!

Don't Bite Your Mother Tongue is a hilarious if taxing jaunt into the misuse of such words as irregardless (I have sworn to forgo this one!); literally -- do you really mean cats & dogs were dropping from the sky? Unique -- neither more nor less, it simply is! Viable -- a venerable verb from medical language that has been resuscitated by the business world where it's doing the rounds as another meaningless piece of verbiage.

& do play the authors' Grammar Games -- be careful though, too much of a good thing can sentence you to hours of recuperation!

These two fellows have made re-learning our language a bit of fun! I'm reading along, getting more & more confused, when, BAM! They add a fillip that opens my eyes & rattles my brain.

Of all the languages in the world, English, has become the lingua franca of commerce & computers, it behoves us to not only become fluent, we also need to put our words in order & avoid inter-cultural confusion with worn out cliches -- in short we had better get better at writing & speaking our mother tongue. Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay gives us mnemonic devices & important advice on how to monitor ourselves before we hit that Send key & slather our deranged & idiomatic(not idiotic!) version over the broadband.

More from Lederer & Dowis: The Write Way

More from Richard Lederer: Anguished English; Get Thee to a Punnery; Crazy English; The Play of Words; The Miracle of Language; Literary Trivia(with Michael Gilleland); Adventures of a Verbivore; Nothing Risqué, Nothing Gained; Pun & Games; Fractured English & The Word Circus

More From Richard Dowis: How to Make Your Writing Reader-Friendly & The Lost Art of the Great Speech
(07/15/01)

Rebecca