１１月７日の英文添削「日本語での解釈例」への挑戦として以下のものを書いてみました。講師のどなたかに添削して頂き結果を後日投稿します。これを機会によい英文が書けるようになりたいと思います。

I teach at our local technical college.  One spring day I was taking the roll in my secretarial class.  Cindy was absent.  Because she was known as a sun worshiper, I suspected she was skipping the class and enjoying the sun.  Nevertheless, I asked, “Cindy won’t be here this afternoon?”

“She went home to lay in the sun,” a young woman in the front row volunteered a frank answer.  And she got “lie” mixed up with “lay”.  “This woman is going to be working as a secretary and yet she makes such a mistake.  Her grammar should be corrected now, otherwise she’d be embarrassed at the office someday”, I thought, and whispered, “Lie”.  I intended to tell her, “Not lay, but lie”, audible only to her to avoid embarrassing her before the class.

But, my consideration for her didn’t work as I intended.

“Okay,” she replied in astonishment. “Cindy got sick and went home.”

In the first place, she didn’t realize that she had made a grammatical error.  In the second place, she thought I was telling her to protect Cindy’s honor by telling a lie to the class as to why Cindy was absent.  So she made up a lie in a hurry, and told it to the class.