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Chris -- 2018-04-11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/footbal … 493687.stm
This story about Wednesday’s football match between Wales and San Marino contains the following (at 21:50 on 2007/03/28):
“Wales begun to lay seize to the San Marino goal and it came as no surprise when Bale doubled the lead on 20 minutes”
Google currently has 87 hits for “lay seize to”, all of which appear to mean “lay siege to”.
Stephen
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My understanding was that both “lay seize” (lay hold) and “lay seige” (beseige) are legitimate expressions, meaning different things. But you’re right, of course about the results of the Google search – plenty of bloggers seem to use them interchangeably.
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“Lay seize to” sounds odd to me. The OED articles on “lay” and “seize” don’t mention it, and the OED does have a separate section on “lay siege to” under “lay.” I think this is a non-standard phrase, at least as far as Anglo-American usage is concerned.
While paging through the Google results for “lay seize to,” I was struck by the fact that many of them—probably the majority—refer to topics in South Asia, esp. India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. And not all the writers are bloggers; a few of the citations seem to be from newspaper articles. It appears that “lay seize to” has a certain currency in South Asian English. And tannerpittman’s right—some of the writers use the term to mean “lay siege to” and others mean “seize”; it’s not always easy to tell the difference.
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You’re right: the prevalence in South Asia is something I hadn’t noticed. Searching the Google News Archive—-
http://www.google.com/archivesearch?hl= … 2&ie=UTF-8—- gives five results, two from the Hindu (India), one from the Hindustan Times (India), and one from the Daily Star (Bangladesh). The other result is, strangely enough, from the Mexia Weekly Herald, of Mexia, Texas, in November of 1937, reporting on the Second Sino-Japanese War.
By the way, I should have noted that the grammatical error in “Wales begun [sic] to lay seize” was in the original, suggesting that the author was in a hurry, and is evidence that this was a one-off ‘braino’, rather than an actual eggcorn. There are no hits for “lay seize to” on google.co.uk .
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