{"id":474,"date":"2009-01-09T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/swings-that-raise-and-lower-from-the-ceiling\/"},"modified":"2011-05-31T19:59:49","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T01:59:49","slug":"swings-that-raise-and-lower-from-the-ceiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2009\/01\/swings-that-raise-and-lower-from-the-ceiling\/","title":{"rendered":"“swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I heard this expression last evening on a Travel Channel television program.<\/p>\n

Problems:<\/strong>
\n1.<\/strong> The verbs are incorrect.
\n2.<\/strong> A preposition is missing.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\nThe TV program was reviewing night life in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

One of the featured locations was a night club in which performers sit and stand on swings hung from the ceiling.<\/p>\n

The narrator claimed that an exciting feature was that the club had “swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”.<\/p>\n

The first problem is that the verbs “raise” and “lower” are transitive verbs<\/a> — that is, verbs that require both a direct subject and one or more objects — whereas intransitive verbs<\/a> — that is, verbs that do not take an object — are required here.<\/p>\n

Examples of transitive verbs include “cut” and “hit” and “put”.<\/p>\n

Examples of intransitive verbs include “die” and “rot” and “sit”.<\/p>\n

“Swings that raise and lower from the ceiling” requires intransitive verbs, and “rise” and “fall” are the appropriate corrections to “raise” and “lower”, respectively.<\/p>\n

These corrections give us “swings that rise and fall from the ceiling”.<\/p>\n

I believe that this use of “raise” and “lower” as intransitive verbs is connected to the use of “lay” as an intransitive verb — as in “Please lay down now!” — through a popular but incorrect assumption that transitive verbs are interchangeable with intransitive verbs. <\/p>\n

The second problem is a lack of parallelism. It makes no sense to say “rise from the ceiling”, so the first and second verbs may not share the preposition “from”.<\/p>\n

Instead, the verb “rise” requires its own preposition in relation to “the ceiling”. That required preposition is “to”.<\/p>\n

I believe that the omission of “to” after the first verb is related to the common English blunder of omitting all prepositions but the final one in a list of verbs in a sentence. My impression is that this blunder comes from speakers and writers not thinking ahead, perhaps because they were not taught about the importance of parallelism in sentences.<\/p>\n

Solution:<\/strong>
\n“swings that rise to and fall from the ceiling”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard this expression last evening on a Travel Channel television program. Problems: 1. The verbs are incorrect. 2. A preposition is missing. Explanation: The TV program was reviewing night life in Las Vegas. 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