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.

One of the featured locations was a night club in which performers sit and stand on swings hung from the ceiling.

The narrator claimed that an exciting feature was that the club had “swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”.

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

Examples of transitive verbs include “cut” and “hit” and “put”.

Examples of intransitive verbs include “die” and “rot” and “sit”.

“Swings that raise and lower from the ceiling” requires intransitive verbs, and “rise” and “fall” are the appropriate corrections to “raise” and “lower”, respectively.

These corrections give us “swings that rise and fall from the ceiling”.

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.

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”.

Instead, the verb “rise” requires its own preposition in relation to “the ceiling”. That required preposition is “to”.

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.

Solution:
“swings that rise to and fall from the ceiling”