You really want to know? I’m lying down now as I type this, with my keyboard lying on my lap. I’m not lying to you; this is really the way everyone should work–feet up, lying there contentedly, spinning out lies (truths, too, let’s hope). I was lying here yesterday, too, in fact, wondering what lies I could tell my father. I lay there for a long time, and after I had lain there to the point that my legs began to atrophy–no lie!–I remembered I had laid the rug on the stove to dry it out.
So, more lies. “Uhh, it fell from the ceiling, Dad?”
Actually, I love lying here lying to my father, because he likes to lie around telling whoppers, too. That’s where I get it from. My favorite is the one about the rooster that tried to mount a chicken while she was roosting there laying an egg. I forget the details but the punch line goes something like: ‘So which one got laid first, the chicken or the egg?’
“Did you lay the rug out on the stove?” he asks me, interrupting my reverie.
“No, sir.” [a blatant lie, right?]
“Well, I didn’t think so because if you did I’d lay you out–bam! Flat.”
He wouldn’t do that. He’s lying. So am I, really, both down and to my father. But one of these days I just may put lye in his sugar bowl, though right now I’m off to play my lyre. Or maybe I’ll just read, some lais by Marie de France or something.
(Ha! I’m such a liar. You should see my collection of leis from Hawaii sometime.) (That one was poor. Well, I’m not a pro like my dad; you can’t expect too much from a lay-liar, laying his head on his elbow, lying out in the sun where he lay yesterday for three hours, thinking about golf. You know what’s coming: play it as it lays.*)
Okay, go back and click on all the ones you know are wrong–where lie and lay have been confused either in their present tense or past. [beat] How many? [beat, beat]
I’m waiting, lying around waiting. . . . . . [Beat, beat, beat, beat, …. ]
Ok. All the ones you picked as wrong… you’re wrong. Read on.
If you didn’t pick any as wrong just because you know me too well, still read on.
If you saw that they were all correct, then you are rare among men and women and will probably work in some kind of literary field. Really. As editor or publisher or writer. And, get out of this file and go on to some other. Meet you where the lay of the land meets the lie of the eye. Laying the laity is not proper for the lay-preacher, more for the laymen under the layette. In the lea of the immense laths with their first coat of laying. I’ll lay you a wager that she laid him out with one low lieing lay. Or she should have. Leave it lay, Kent; or is it lie?
Meanwhile, for the rest of us (I’m hearing it wrong so much these days that on occasion I have to factor it down to see which verb I’m using), here’s how the confusion comes about, and knowing this will help you keep the two verbs straight; so at least if you make the effort, you can figure out which form of which verb is correct. Of course, this is going to take a quick history in morphology.
Discussion/Explanation of the Confusion
You may have already read, under Possessives, how nouns used to have in Old English some eight or ten forms–one for plural, one for possessive, another for when it was the subject, yet another when used as object of verb or preposition: they all had different endings, depending on how used in the sentence.
Well, verbs did this too, and they still do. We don’t use the same form of the verb to indicate past time as we do to indicate present time. I talk too much vs. I talked all last night. I run the mile vs. I ran it in under five minutes, in my dream last night.
But there aren’t eight of these for verbs; there are only three: a present tense form, a simple past tense form (talked, ran), and a past participial form (used with have or had: I have run this race for the last time). Spread out across time, it looks like:
present tense form past tense form past participle form
I dig it. I dug it yesterday. I have dug it a lot in the past.
dig dug (have) dug
run ran (have) run
sing sang (have) sung
bring brought (brang is XX) (have) brought (brung)
kiss kissed (have) kissed
talk talked (have) talked
See any patterns here? Notice the -ed’s? Verbs that form their simple past tense forms by adding -ed smack onto the present form, are called regular verbs. They also call these weak verbs. They’re by far the most common. Like, talk, climb, fork, hoodwink, kiss, piss, grouse, animadvert, tergiservate, screw, collude, pit (but not sit), cause, tense, change, hope, knock, rock, sock, stock, block, hock, defrock, mock, top, stop, pop, lock, haze, skate, bake. . . what about make? Take?
But some verbs form their past tense forms via an internal vowl change, like sing/sang, drink/drank,
and compared with the regular verbs, these are irregular, and are called strong verbs.
Some verbs are so irregular that they’re hopeless. They are the most common ones: they got knocked around the most:
be (am/are/is) was/were (have) been
Now–finally!–the verb to lie, as in to lie down, lie on the floor, or just lie there bored and exhausted,
is a strong verb. (Meaning what? Meaning look for an internal vowel change in the past tense.)
lie lay lain
The babe lies asleep in his manger. He lay there yesterday, too. He’s lain there so long I
fear he’s dead.
[It’s ok: some say he was resurrected.]
You can see the problem: the past tense form of to lie is identical to the present tense form of to lay, as in to lay a carpet on the floor. I lie on the floor where I always lay my carpet. I lay on the floor yesterday, where I lay my carpet every damn day.
Ah, ha! But here’s the tip off. Notice that one of them takes a carpet, or an egg, or tiles, or a foundation. One of them will always, always, always take a direct object:
It lays an egg. I lay a carpet. She laid the foundation yesterday. We have laid the tiles twice now.
Whereas the other verb, to lie, won’t ever, ever, ever, no never, take a direct object. It’ll take plenty of adverbial stuff, who doesn’t?
I lie down. The bird lies there dead. We were lying in front of the TV when dad walked in. We were lying there yesterday, too, for mom. We’ve lain there in front of that TV so often that the tiles that we laid there last summer are worn away. [None of these things coming after the verb are direct objects: they don’t receive the action of the verb, they just tell you more about the verb–where, how, how much.]
So, here they are:
lie lay (have) lain
lay laid (have) laid
See the pattern:
to lie — lay —
to lay lay — —
To lay is a transitive verb: takes a direct object.
To lie is an intransitive verb: can’t take a direct object.
The simple past tense (the perfect) of to lie looks exactly like the present tense of to lay.
The past participles of each of these is different: laid and lain.
So maybe that’s how to keep them straight: remember which one takes an object and which one doesn’t, provided you can remember the three forms for each.
lie lay lain versus lay laid laid
So how remember which one takes the object, lie or lay ?
Well, you don’t lie a carpet, right? Nor an egg. Nor any person, place, or thing. So it must be the other one.
Well, okay, sue me, cause I’m going to tell you how I worked it out in the 9th grade at my all-boys prep school. The teacher might being going on about transitive and intransitive, weak and strong, regular and irregular, chickens and eggs, but I said to myself: Okay, LAY takes an object, like getting laid (a sex object, by golly, a partner). LIE is what you do when you don’t have a
partner. You lie about it.
Back in prepschool, after I’d laid me down to sleep, I still used to lie there awake thinking, if I would just lay down my pride for once… well… Maybe not. I’d probably still get laid out by the rest of the guys’ skepticism, and then just lie there for days (my spirit), lying on its stomach, laying to rest my reputation as a hot shot. If only I’d have laid it all out in front of me like this I wouldn’t have lain there half the night thinking if only I’d gone to school in Hawaii. Don’t you get a free lei as you get off the plane?
* to play it as it lays, in golf
This would seem to prove me wrong. The ball is just lying there, right? On a tangent with the earth. One should play it as it lies.
Maybe golfers are just such nouveaux riches that they don’t know any better, and the Country Clubs have closed ranks around their solecisms. 19th Hole, after all! It’s against nature.
In fact, I think it’s an intransitive use of to lay. (I know, I know, I told you it was transitive (always takes an object), and it is most of the time, but consider:
Lay on, Macduff!
Lay aft, mates. And you in the sails, lay aloft.
This hen is a great layer, and she laid this morning as usual.
I’ll lay you a wager. I’ll lay as he never even showed up. (trans and intrans)
Odysseus shouted to his men to lay to their oars, or be eaten by Scylla.
The suitors laid in waiting for Telemachus’ boat, in the strait between Ithaca and the mainland.
They laid into me with much verbal abuse.
We laid over in Paris for three days, alas.
In the fray, she laid about her with a fury unsurpassed.
To get laid, actually, as in somebody or other got laid last night. Good thing they were married.
And to play it as it lays, comes from a verb use of a noun formed out of this intransitive sense of the verb as per many of the examples above: the lay, as in the lay of the land–the way in which something is situated, the position it’s in, how it’s arranged. To play it as it lays means you can’t move the ball: you’re stuck with the position it’s in, up against a tree or whatever.
And, now, along with anybody who’s gotten this far, now I lay me down to sleep.