ABSTRACT
ISO U R ENG LIS H D E G ENE RAT I N G '? 19 "There are some happy writers whose mission it is to expound the manners and ,customs of the great.. . . And yet, alas! to these writers when they have done all, yet must we add that they fail to satisfy their models .... 'As if these sort of people knew anything about society! ' Lady Adeliza says." The queer blunder seems to persist in England, for in a novel so recent as "Katherine Bush," by Elinor Glyn, we find one of the ,characters asking whether her employer has "'3!ny partkular paper for these sort of things" (Cosmopolitan, March, 1916, page 485) and another remarking that "those kind of natures always win" (ib., July, 1916, page 176). Dean Alford is also authority for the statement that Eton graduates are especially prone to confuse the verbs lie and lay, an error very rare in respectable American society and one that has grieved me much in a great English story-teller, Anthony Trollope, as for instance in the 7th chapter of "The Warden": "I have done more than sleep upon it; I have laid awake upon it." It occUvS also in an extraordinary place for a grammatical error, "Stormonth's English Word-Book," where laid is actually given as the participle 'Of lie! After noting this, one need hardly be surprised to find the same writer (in the supplement to his excellent dictionary) defining Alborak as the name of "the white mule on which Mohammed is said to have rode from Jerusalem to heaven." If an American lexicographer were caught using laid for lain or rode for ridden, what a text it
