Do you go extinct or become extinct?

This is a captivating image. Well, for me it is. Where I come from we don't talk about things going extinct or that something has went extinct. In my part of the world things become or became extinct.

Yet, there it was, in my morning paper: an article on how Neanderthals went extinct. My first reaction was that this article was written by a five-year-old who hadn't quite grasped the basics of which verbs to use and when. Surely this wasn't written by a trained journalist? All my (mostly) latent grammar and language snobbishness came scrabbling to the surface but I womanfully pushed it back down and looked at this from a more investigative point of view.

Further into the article I discovered that the journalist was reporting the work done by some researchers who had published their findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. After using the search engine of my choice to do a little research of my own, I discovered that some North Americans commonly use went extinct or go extinct or whatever the tense of the verb to go is required. Some people in the United Kingdom got quite defensive about their use of go extinct as well.

I dug some more and discovered that among professional editors the preferred usage was to become extinct. All the online dictionaries included sentence samples using the verb to become. Very few included a sentence sample with to go extinct. 

Editors were of the opinion that the use of to go extinct might be in common parlance in some parts of the world but it wasn't the correct usage. Certainly 26,775,000 online search results for become extinct or became extinct suggests that it is the preferred choice. Go extinct and went extinct only managed 1,585,000. So, where does this leave us? I would suggest that you stick with become extinct if you want to look like you know what you are talking about.

As for the newspaper article, perhaps the research paper was peer-reviewed but never passed in front of the eyes of a professional proofreader. And perhaps the journalist lifted some sentences or snippets intact from the published findings. However it occurred, it is indicative of the change in the way journalists must work. More and more errors slip through as the pace at which they work speeds up. As we see more errors in print I wonder: if they aren't getting enough time to get the basics right (grammar, spelling) then what else are they getting wrong that we don't know about?

Lay 'lie, lay, laid and lain' confusion to rest

If you already know the difference between  lie, lay, laid and lain you can smugly go and do whatever you want. For the rest of us, let's lay the confusion to rest, once and for all!

To understand the difference between these words you just need to know that we use verbs to describe something we are doing right now (present tense), something we have done already (past tense) and something we will do after this point in time (future tense). There are other variants as well, but those are the basics.

The key to using these words is just work out if you are talking about something that is happening right now, or something that happened in the past.

Lie

Lie mainly refers to being in a horizontal position on a supporting surface.

In the present tense (happening right now) we can say

I lie on the bed.
I am lying on the bed.

In the past tense (already happened) we can say

I lay on the bed.
I had lain on the bed (...for what felt like a minute and then the alarm clock went off.)

Lay

Lay mainly refers to putting down something gently or carefully, or putting something down and setting it in position for use.

In the present tense (happening right now) we can say

I lay the floor tiles in position.
I am laying the floor tiles in position.

In the past tense (already happened) we can say

I laid the floor tiles in position.
I had laid the floor tiles in position. (...when the next door neighbours' dog came running over them and messed them up. Just saying.)

Once you have worked out what you are doing (lying horizontally or placing something) you can easily choose the correct word.