Since flesh out was well explained by last week’s letter writer, I see no reason to add anything about that phrase. But other usage issues have appeared in the last couple of days that merit comment.
First of all, the very capable technician who did an ultrasound on my carotid arteries asked me to “lay down on the table.” Yeah, right, I know, who cares? In fact, I didn’t bother correcting him; why take the risk of antagonizing someone who is going to perform a medical test on you?
Nonetheless, and maybe this will be the last time you ever hear this from anyone, he should have asked me to “lie down on the table.” In joining the millions of Americans who daily use lay in place of lie, the technician was simply affirming that the distinction effectively vanished during the last decade or so.
There are explanations for that, notably the fact that lay is the past tense of lie (“I lie down for a nap nearly every day, but I did not lay down yesterday.”) as well another word with an entirely separate meaning. Also, lie means something else itself – to tell an untruth – so it can’t mean what lay means, can it? It’s time to give up the fight, recognizing that the verbal marketplace has decided this one.
But I raised my eyebrows at a subtitle in The Bling Ring (as Grammarnators get older, they often put the English titles on when watching a DVD) that said, “That must have been nerve-racking.” I was taught that the term was nerve-wracking, wrack being a word from Old English that means ruin or destruction.
What a surprise, then, to find that my dictionary accepts both, since rack means “to cause to suffer torture, pain, or anguish” or “to stretch or strain violently,” both of which derive from the practice of torturing people on the rack. In time, I’ll bet that nerve-racking will totally replace nerve-wracking, just as lie has replaced lay in everyday speech. That surmise ties together my two subjects in a way that I did not foresee when I began writing, a clear signal that it’s time to stop.
