THE NEW FRONTIER CHAT THREAD !

I thought "he was lying on the ground" was a grammatically correct sentence?

I guess it honestly depends on context and how lazy you're being

Honestly screw english

let's let english die out quick everyone learn Russian

"he was lying" is correct ashdakhjjk?? i guess u could also say "he was laying"???

i dont even know my own damn language my dudes english is a bitch

Welcome to english, where you can have two different conjugations of words and them both be correct simply depending on how you like to talk

"he was lying on the rug" is not correct, because apparently to say he was "lying on the rug" it means he wasn't telling the truth on the rug. my english teacher said that it was so commonly misused to say "he lay on the rug" that many people just accepted "lying" to mean "lay".

and "laying" I believe is something that's to describe what is currently happening, not something that had happened. so "last night my brother was laying on the floor playing video games" would be an incorrect form of the word "laying".

ive been english-ing wrong my whole life

I always thought that lying meant both to not tell the truth and to lay down it was just one of those wonky words

Which lead me to believe it was lying and lieing as a kid (I figured out that that wasn't right earlier)

I mean in a slang-ish way it could be "was laying"?? Idk at this point man

We have a bunch of language rules but they don't really properly teach us all those rules (or at least it was like this for me, I just figured out how to say things in a way that made sense) and that may be a big part of why we break all the rules and the English language is quickly descending into madness, and why so many people are going into college not knowing how to write a proper essay

yeah dittoing tim

we just kinda pick stuff up and we're never rly taught all these things which is why native speakers are usually the worst at english lmfao

As long as other people understand what you are trying to say you don't have to really follow the rules, so we break all of the rules

The weird thing is that in that case, "last night my brother lay on the floor" doesn't sound right. It might be because it sounds like a perfect tense but it makes more sense to use the imperfect, thus "was laying"? If that makes sense?

I've literally been lying in bed thinking about this for the last ten minutes. (Lying in bed, is that even correct?)

YEA EXACTLY

im having an existential crisis

THO I guess in that case u might say "my brother laid on the floor" instead?? isnt "laid" and accepted past particle of "lay"??

i usually use "laid" or "was laying"

"last night my brother lay on the floor" doesn't sound right, that's true, but according to the rules of grammar that is the correct form to use. honestly it's so weird.

and "laid" is usually used when describing an action being done by someone to an object, like "Ryan laid out his outfit the previous night so he wouldn't have to choose it in the morning". i suppose it could be used to describe a human, but normally humans aren't referred to as objects.

"last night my brother laid on the floor"

Even after all that it depends on where you are- people in Mississippi talk a lot differently than people in London

well don't people in london use a different form of english too? like they spell color "colour" and stuff like that.

honestly i think at this point of time American English has become a thing because it's so different from England English.

yep yep

we spell things different here in canada too, its not american english but its not quite UK english either

my favourite (thats one) difference is prob maneuver vs manoeuvre

like how did that even happen

Yeah they have a bunch of u's in their words and have a whole different set of slang

Don't they spell gray as grey

Edit: they as in not-america

I thought it was america who spelled gray as grey??

I don't know- I'm just an exchange student here, people confuse me so much xD

we also tend to flip the r and the e at the ends of words

like we say centre and litre instead of center and liter

edit cuz ninja'd: yea america just basically took english and said 'fuck it' and changed all the spellings, most everywhere else uses british english from my knowledge

Americans spell center "centre" sometimes too, although I've noticed it's usually when they're trying to sound fancy. They do a lot of things to appear more fancy actually, which is a little silly if you ask me.

welcome to the hellhole that is America

its prob cuz french links??

in french we say like centre, entre, etc and thats where most of these words in english came from

and french is seen as a fancy language for whatever reason