byzantienne:

jumpingjacktrash:

ceruleancynic:

PEAK/PEEK, LIE/LAY, DRAGGED/DRUG: DON’T MIX EM UP, KIDS

We’ve been through this before. I will probably go find the last time I wrote about this and link it, but for now have the quick version.

1) Peak/peek

A peak is a pinnacle, highest point, summit. Mountains have peaks. So does sufficiently whipped cream. One’s emotions can reach a peak. 

A peek is a furtive or clandestine glance at something. A sneak peek is an exclusive glimpse into a thing others don’t get to see yet. 

A sneak peak is a mountain which is trying not to be seen. It is not what you wish to convey. Saying “sneak peak” when you actually mean “sneak peek” does not do you or the thing which you are peeking at any favors whatsoever.

2) Lie/lay

This one is complicated. You lay something else down; you yourself lie down. When you cause other people or animals or substances to drape themselves on you, they are lying down on top of you. 

You lay a table. You do not lie a table. A chicken lays an egg, rather than lying it. Here we see the verb to lay directly meaning the act of oviposition, but as the chicken goes through the process of laying the egg, it also sets or places the egg upon whatever is underneath it, thus laying the egg as an object onto that substrate. You may lay yourself upon the table, but in the act of doing so, you are lying on it. 

The verse “now I lay me down to sleep” is in fact perfectly concurrent with the use of lie vs lay: the speaker or singer is stating that they are laying themselves, as a physical entity or object, down to sleep. “I lay me” = “I am lying.” Someone who can do grammar can explain the different tenses involved here, but when you say I lay me you are saying I am lying or about to lie down in a ceremonial way such that [myself] is the thing I set or am setting down.  

If you are describing the act of reclining your person on or against something, you are lying down. If you are depositing something else upon that something, you are laying [it] down. If you want to tell people that you spent some time reclining, you say “I’ve been lying down,” or “I was/had been lying down.” Do not say “I was laying down,” or even “X was laying down with/on/beside me,” because this is wrong.

3) Dragged/drug

This one is rarer but still extant. One drags a thing; one has dragged a thing. One has not drug a thing – drug itself is either the noun medicament or the verb to medicate. One can drug a thing, in terms of giving it drugs; one has drugged the thing if this has occurred already, and the thing can be described as having been drugged or just straight-up drugged once you have done this. It has absolutely nothing to do with physically taking hold of something and moving it to another location.

Drug is not the past participle of the verb to drag: that is dragged. I do not know the particular rules governing how this type of verb is conjugated in English or why – English is basically the linguistics equivalent of the kid turning you upside down for your lunch money and then shooting up in the bathroom – but this is straight-up wrong. Do not do it. 

I suppose you could make a case for “drug” based on the tacit acceptance of “ain’t” and “y’all” but it is wrong. It is as wrong as yunk for yanked or grub for grabbed. It is extremely jarring and will make people blink at you. Do not do it.

I refer the explanations for why these rules are rules to people who know and can explain them: but they are the rules, and you have to learn them, and you have to prove you have learned them before you can go breaking them because otherwise people will blink quite a lot at you and wonder if you know that you’re fucking up.

OH AND BONUS ROUND

one dyes one’s hair; one is in the act of dyeing it, with dye

one does not dy one’s hair or be in the act of dying it, with dy

dying is the act of shuffling off the mortal coil; dyeing is the act of changing the color of a thing

the E is of crucial importance here

‘drug’ instead of ‘dragged’ appears to be a southern american dialect thing. there are a few other altered past tenses i’ve run across from the same sources – for instance, ‘grit’ as its own past tense, instead of ‘gritted’. ‘he grit his teeth.’ considering how wacky english tenses are, with stuff like shut and drunk and swim/swam/swum (seriously what’s going on there), i can’t blame dialects for throwing a few similar noises at the wall to see what sticks.

just don’t do it unless your speaker or POV character is speaking a type of english that’s full of those words. and also probably says y’all unironically.

Okay so apparently what happens to me if I actually sleep eight hours and the sun is out and I have coffee and no immediate horrible tasks is that I want to talk about The Strong Verb In English

because the dragged/drug dialect variation is real and true (though @ceruleancynic is absolutely right that in Standard American English the grammatically correct form is dragged). But @jumpingjacktrash is also right in a) noting that Southern dialects of American English often preserve ‘drug’ as well as other oddities like ‘grit his teeth’ (that one is more widespread than Southern, as it’s in my personal idiolect as well and I’m a native New Yorker – for me ‘to grit’ is conjugated ‘he grits (currently) / he grit (in the past)’ and ‘gritted’ is kinda weird); b) pointing out that dragged/drug and grit/gritted are related to the weirdness of drink/drank/drunk and swim/swam/swum. They are! They totally are!

because there are secretly two kinds of verbs in English, and we make the past tenses differently with Kind A and Kind B. Linguistics has a bunch of names for the two different kinds, but the one I learned are STRONG verbs and WEAK verbs.

I will explain. (I will explain for American English, as this is my native language.)

your standard or regular English verb, the kind that if you were lucky enough to have a grammar class was taught as ‘the regular verb’, is in fact a Weak Verb. Weak verbs are grammatically differentiated using suffixes – stuff tacked on to the end of the verb. Let’s use ‘to jump’ as an example, and let’s stick with third person singular (so one dude/lady/individual, doing a thing). I’m going to avoid singular they just for the moment, because it can confuse grammar prescriptivists and we want to make them go away for a minute, this is hard enough.

he/she/it/xie jumps – in this present moment, the individual is going up and down under their own power. We have the base form of the verb (also called the ‘verb stem’), ‘jump’, and then we’ve added a present-tense marker (’-s’) to the END of the base form. This process is called inflecting the verb – adding or changing something about the verb to tell us some information about its tense (…or person or number or mood, but we’re working with tense.)

he/she/it/xie jumped – in the past, the individual went up and down under their own power. Here’s the verb stem again, with a different suffix. jump + ed. The ‘-ed’ suffix is how English marks the past tense.

he/she/it/xie had jumped – in the past, BEFORE SOME OTHER PAST EVENT, the individual went up and down under their own power. Ah, the past perfect. Fuck the past perfect, seriously, no one explains this thing. Basically, languages can sometimes pay a lot of attention to sequencing, and mark when stuff happens in relation to other stuff grammatically. We use the past perfect to make clear that one event happened before another event in the past. So, in this case, the individual jumped, and then some other thing happened in the past, and now both those things have happened. We form the past perfect for a weak English verb by using the past tense (jump + ed) and adding an auxiliary or helping verb to the front of the word. In this case we are using the past tense of the verb to have to make our helping verb. Auxiliary verbs are a little beyond this explanation, so let’s just leave it as a pattern: to make the past perfect for a weak verb, you have past tense auxiliary (had) + stem + past suffix (-ed)

now for the STRONG verb. Which in English grammar class is often taught as the irregular verb. It’s … not. Like, it’s not as common, but it’s totally regular, it’s not weird and pattern-breaky at all. (A real irregular verb is ‘to be’ or ‘to have’. Those things are fucked.) The thing is, though, we don’t have that many strong verbs in English, and most of them are really old. As in, the sounds they have haven’t changed all that much from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of English (… and German and Latin and Greek and Russian and Armenian and Farsi. PIE got around.) Some of the strong verbs are ‘to sing’ and ‘to swim’.

What do all of these strong verbs immediately have in common? Their verb stem has an i vowel (and they’re all one syllable.) This is important in telling us how to change their tense. Let’s work with ‘to swim’, it’s a nice one.

he/she/it/xie swims – So far, so identical to the weak verb. Stem + third person singular present-tense marker (-s). An individual is currently moving themselves through water.

he/she/it/xie swam – There’s no -ed here! Instead, to make the past tense, we change the VOWEL of the strong verb from i to a. He swam, he sang. (Also he drove, but that’s a spelling weirdness.)

he/she/it/xie swum – And here we don’t even have a helping verb; the vowel has changed again, gotten darker and lower in the mouth. He swum, in the past before some other past event. He sung.

Why the hell does this happen?

Well. There’s a rule in Proto-Indo-European called ablaut, which basically means vowel changes. The vowel that appeared in any given syllable is called its “grade”. In
many words, the basic vowel was *e (e-grade), but, depending on what syllable of a word the stress fell on in PIE, this could change to *o (o-grade), or disappear altogether (zero grade). Both e and o could also be lengthened to ē and ō (lengthened grade). In Proto-Germanic, a daughter language of PIE, ablaut was one of the ways to determine the tense of the verb. An e-grade verb was in the present tense, an o-grade verb was past, and a lengthened grade verb was past perfect (I am simplifying this process iMMENSELY. Historical linguists – forgive me. This post is getting long.)

Now, in modern English (and modern German, for that matter), strong verbs are gradually disappearing. This is because all languages tend to get simpler as they get older. And we have this perfectly understandable weak verb, which conjugates in very predictable ways, and it’s just a hell of a lot easier to say jumps/jumped/had jumped than swims/swam/swum. We find the strong verb confusing. So we … turn it into a weak verb. In a hundred years, we will probably be saying swims/swimmed/had swimmed.

This process – the simplification to weak from strong – is about 4/5ths of the way done for drag. Drag used to be a strong verb – drags/drug/drug – and it is normalizing to a weak verb. There are still placed where the strong form persists in dialect.

… okay wow I have gone on for AGES and probably been somewhat confusing – I’m not a historical linguist, I’m a historian who knows a bunch of dead languages and likes reading linguistics stuff for fun. But hopefully this helps a little.