Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/54

lighted or lit, and that the use of it in our days is a grammatical blunder.^[1]

But every year pleaded stronger and stronger for the Earl's conception.—J. R. Green.

Comparative adverbs of this type must be formed only from those positive adverbs which do not use -ly, as hard, fast. We talk of going strong, and we may therefore talk of going stronger; but outside slang we have to choose between stronglier—poetical, exalted, or affected—and more strongly.

The silence that underlaid the even voice of the breakers along the sea front.—Kipling.

Lie and lay have cost us all some perplexity in childhood. The distinction is more difficult in the compounds with over and under, because in them -lie is transitive as well as -lay, but in a different sense. Any one who is not sure that he is sound on the point by instinct must take the trouble to resolve them into lie over or lay over, &c., which at once clears up the doubt. A mistake with the simple verb is surprising when made, as in the following, by a writer on grammar:

I met a lad who took a paper from a package that he carried and thrust it into my unwilling hand. I suspected him of having laid in wait for the purpose.— R. G.White.

A confusion, perhaps, between lay wait and lie in wait.

I am not sure that yours and my efforts would suffice separately; but yours and mine together cannot possibly fail.

The first yours is quite wrong; it should be your. This mistake is common. The absolute possessives, ours and yours, hers, mine and thine, (with which the poetic or euphonic use of the last two before vowels has nothing to do) are to be used only as pronouns or as predicative adjectives, not as attributes to an expressed and following noun. That they were used by old writers as in our example is irrelevant. The