[TristanDaCunha]

So weird -- when did we all decide to start saying "I was laying in bed" instead of "I was lying in bed"? I have noticed this shift over the past few years.

Laying has always been past tense "That day I lay in bed for hours" or transitive "I lay the books down". Chickens also could be laying in bed, if eggs are coming out of them. Lying has always been intransitive "I was lying in bed". But nowadays, "I was laying in bed" is almost all I see.

[taejo]

"the usage, though non-standard, is ubiquitous, and in fact has been around for over seven hundred years. Robert Burchfield, in his third edition of Fowler, writes that in the 17th and 18th centuries the two words’ alternation was not considered a mistake, even in literary text, but that nowadays it’s either taken as ‘evidence of imperfect education’ or ‘accepted in regional speech as being a deep-rooted survival from an earlier period’."

https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/laying-down-the-lie-...

[def8cefe]

You should be putting punctuation inside the quote when it ends a sentence.

Single quotes, not double quotes, should be used in your comment since you are not completely and directly quoting your source.

You should not be capitalising the first letter of a quote when it occurs after the beginning of a sentence.

These are just some of the grammatical errors you've made in two paragraphs. I've probably made some too. It's pointless to discuss these things outside academic contexts as long as the text can still be understood.

[lone-commenter]

Those are typographic eccentricities, to be pedant :)

And they're not even that uncommon on the Internet and amongst tech people. (See the Jargon file[1], for example.)

But I get your point: pedantry is often needless, and sometimes even lacks proper justification (see taejo's comment). But it's difficult to stop seeing errors when you see them, so I would forgive the parent for being that Hacker News guy.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

[def8cefe]

No, it's English grammar. (EDIT: Actually it's not. See, there are mistakes everywhere. It's not typographic either though.)

There's nothing to forgive. My comment was instruction on being a better reader/listener.

Focus on the things people are saying and not nitpicking their delivery and you will absorb more information.

[lone-commenter]

> Focus on the things people are saying and not nitpicking their delivery and you will absorb more information.

I agree. Form is not so important.

[def8cefe]

It's something poor students/learners do. You spend all your time looking for minor errors in instruction or text so you can 'win' while missing the actual lesson or overarching idea. I am definitely not innocent of this as a former high school dropout lol. Cheers.

[TristanDaCunha]

I gratefully accept the information of your post, but I don't think it manages to make the intended point. Notice how many times you used the word "should", which was never a consideration in my post.

We could talk about should. As a starting point, it would seem to me most useful to preserve meaningful distinctions which convey information, and otherwise make language as fluid and relaxed as possible. But I'm not expert.

[elliekelly]

That’s not grammar, it’s style and convention. And the convention is not the same across all english-speaking countries. Parent comment’s punctuation is “correct” by British standards, for example.

[def8cefe]

I've become the very thing I sought to destroy.

[joshuaissac]

> You should be putting punctuation inside the quote when it ends a sentence.

It is commonplace to put punctuation outside the quotation marks when the punctuation itself is not being quoted.

[def8cefe]

You're missing the point.

[asveikau]

I was taught in elementary school (in the US) that punctuation inside the quotes is correct usage in the UK. It was good of them to note when we were so young that the rules we were being taught were not universal and that we shouldn't freak out if we encounter a text using different rules.

[circlefavshape]

I've always thought it was an American thing. I've never heard a UK/Irish person say "laying" for "lying"

[collyw]

I haven't noticed it in British English. My default reaction would be blame it on Americans screwing up the language again.

[emilfihlman]

It's just the same thing as "would of", ie people making grammar errors.