My design sense kicked in, against my better judgment: I need a new word, usable in the same context, which doesn’t have any bigoted overtones. Wait — better — a word which specifically flips the nuance to be disparaging toward heterosexuals. Then we get satire and linguistic engineering for the price of one.

And so, friends, let us henceforth banish the terms “gay” and “fag” from our discourse, and replace them with “het” (a term derived, for those of you keeping score, from “heterosexual”).

Bring it back. Fight heteronormativity.

End note: my friends and I tried this back at RPI. Needless to say, it did not catch on, which is for the best. From now on I’m leaving language to natural selection.

For example, farther and further are mostly interchangeable, but they are subtly different. For example, farther should be used with measures of distance, whereas further is for measures of degree or time; further is also used as the comparative form of far. Although Wiktionary tells me that experts have never made a fuss about this distinction, I tend to err on the side of grammar nerditry.

Songs are different than regular usage, though. Grammatical constraints are often relaxed or broken for artistic effect or because of the exigency of other types of constraints. It used to irk me when artists would use the improper form of lay or lie in their songs, until I thought of how weird it would sound to use the correct form. At the same time, I have the utmost respect for artists who navigate treacherous grammatical straits properly and elegantly.

Quick grammar lesson: to lay is transitive, as in “I lay the book down on the table.” To lie is intransitive, as in “I lie down on the couch to take a nap.” The confusion arises because the past tense of lie is lay. I lie / I lay / I had lain. I lay / I laid / I had laid. I’ll try not to judge you for getting this wrong.

A recent example is The Bird & The Bee’s Love Letter to Japan: “and now, all my heart I will lay down precisely at your feet”. The present tense of to lay. The transitive one. Perfect.