Lying (or Laying?) Around

My daughter emailed me yesterday:

“… btw*, yesterday mariana was like "whats the past tense of lay? is it lied or lay?? I told her that u lived for that stuff and she was like "yeah, right" and i said "seriously, my mom has a blog on the english language, lets look it up …… I remember that u did give us a lecture on the past tense of lay/lie but figures i didnt exactly keep it in my brain.”

(*btw: an Internet acronym for ‘by the way.’ FYI.)

Quickly, before I start musing on what writing emails and instant messages are doing to the next generation’s writing, spelling and punctuation (wow -- how fuddy-duddy does that sound!), or about how my children never keep my lectures in their brains; I want to say upfront that I’m happy that Mariana was even aware that she didn’t know the past tense of “lay.” Lots of people don’t know, but either they don’t know that they don’t know, or they don’t care, so they never ask or even wonder.

Sorry to say, I did not have a posting about LIE and LAY, so I’d like to remedy that situation right now – because what a difference it makes to get it right! One summer I was on the night train to Paris, something that still rings of black and white movies and romance. The reality, however, was bleak: I shared a compartment with some family from a southern U.S. state and the whole night the mother kept saying to her two-year-old, “Laaaaay doww-n, Susie! Laay down!” The experience might have been just that much less awful if the mother had said, “Lie down, Susie! LIE down!” (even with some expletives thrown in, as long as she got the grammar right).

So here’s the thing about LAY and LIE:

LAY takes an object, which makes it a “transitive” verb, so the dictionary will stick a little italicized, “tr.” next to “lay” in the dictionary. Basically, using “lay” means that you must lay SOMETHING down, as in, “Whenever I walk in the door, I lay the car keys on the table.” (I wish); or the exhausted parent who lays her baby down for a nap and then conks out herself. Or think of the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” (As you know from “Myself Misuse” – it should have said, “Now I lay myself down to sleep” but – whatever, or as my daughter would write: w/e.)

LIE does not take an object, so it is an “intransitive” verb and the dictionary will stick a little italicized “intr.” next to “lie” in the dictionary.** As in, “How do I train my dog to lie down?” or “The Atlantic Ocean lies between our two countries.” New York City lies a mere 26 miles from my home, but some days, it seems so far away, it may as well be the Atlantic Ocean.”

** To lie, meaning (among various related definitions) to rest, recline or be in a prostrate or recumbent position, comes from the Old English, “licgan.” The other meaning of “lie,” as in the intransitive verb, “to present false information with the intention of deceiving” comes from the Old English, “leogan.” (I don’t know how to pronounce those words, but I think it’s interesting that they both end up as “lie.”)

Of course, both LAY and LIE come in different verb tenses: a verb tense tells you when the action happened, and the three main ones to know are the present, the past, and the past participle. In case you’ve forgotten, the present tense describes general, routine kinds of things, like “I write my blog on Sunday;” the past tense describes and action that is over and done with, as in, “I watched an old movie yesterday;” and a participle (as verb form) usually goes with a “helping verb” like have/has/had. Think: “The Great Oz has spoken!”

So here’s LAY and LIE, present, past and participle:

TO LAY
Present: lay/lays … Who lays down the law in your house?
Past: laid … I laid my car keys down somewhere – where are they?
Past Participle: laid … That reminds me of a sign I once saw posted inside a Greenwich Village apartment building: “Walk carefully. The tiles have just been laid.” To which someone else had scrawled, “Lucky tiles!”

TO LIE (as in lie down)
Present: lie/lies … My Bonnie lies over the ocean.
Past: lay … Yesterday, my Bonnie lay down on the couch -- and on the job.
Past Participle: lain … My Bonnie has lain around for years, thinking about when to come home.

Now you begin to see where the confusion, ahem, lies. The past tense of LIE is the present tense of LAY. Even worse, saying “I lay down” sounds a lot like “I laid down” so it’s hard to hear the difference. Still, if you think of little Susie’s mom yelling in my ears all night in that train compartment, you’ll try to master this. And yes, people really do say, “lain.” Although I haven’t lain awake nights thinking about all this.

It’s interesting to note that on Google, dog training sites often stick both “lie” and “lay” in their web page titles, just to make sure no one – including Susie’s mom – misses “How to Train Your Dog to Lie Down, Lay Down;” thankfully, the instructions (in the two sites I read) only use “lie down” in the text. (Which reminds me that in Barnes & Noble’s early days in New York, they had to list the store in the phone book under both “Barnes” & Noble and “Bonds” & Noble to accommodate some of the locals’ pronunciation.)

BTW, there are two other pairs of transitive-intransitive verbs; that is, ones that are similar, except one takes an object and the other does not: RAISE -- tr. v. (raised, have/has raised) and RISE – intr. v. (rose, risen) and SET – tr. v. (set and set) and SIT – intr. v. (sat, sat). That’s why you raise a window when the thermometer rises, and not the other way around. That could also be why you set the table before you sit down to eat. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be too much confusion with these verbs. The real question now is, how are you going to ease your new words, “transitive” and “intransitive” into your next cocktail conversation?! Okay, okay, w/e.