The Difference Between Lay and Lie
[admin / May 28th, 2010 / Young Bright Things ]It seems to me that when people have conquered the two/too/to fiasco, or the there/their/they’re conundrum, they give up, convinced of their mastery of the English language. And I know I’m probably going to sound  kind of like an  asshole for saying this, but I’m just going to say it anyway, because I know when to use “lie” and when to use “lay” in a sentence, and that gives me an undue sense of entitlement, which I plan to milk for at least the next three paragraphs.
It’s crazy the number of submissions I read that have lie/lay mixups in them. Some of them are really great stories, too. And then I stumble over a  I want you to lay down. Okay, I’ll say this, and you can write it on a post-it note: you  lay something on the table, and you  lie down on the couch. Is it a pen? Are you putting it somewhere? You  lay it.  Lay requires a direct object (the pen).  Is it your body? Are you throwing it into that hot bartender’s bed? You  lie down. You lie down sexily.
The past tense is a little trickier, because the past tense of  lie is  lay. (Last Wednesday, we lay down in the grass.) The past tense of  lay is  laid. (Henry laid the fork down instead of stabbing Julie.) You can put that on the post-it note, too. It’s not really cheating.
Yes, this means that the Snow Patrol song “Chasing Cars” is grammatically incorrect. Sad as it is, it can’t be undone. But you now hold the key to constructing proper sentences using lay and lie. And we all know there’s nothing sexier than proper grammar.
I mix up taut and taunt sometimes. I know what they mean, so I guess it’s just carelessness.
“Lie lady lie, lie across my big brass bed.”
That is so wrong.
I think grammar lessons are always appropriate. No matter how you good you are, you can still shoot yourself in the foot with careless mistakes. Sometimes when I read through a draft I find stuff like this and feel a kind of shame. I can read and write in three languages, and still I make errors that a third grader would catch.
In fiction, sometimes the grammatical errors are intentional. For example, because I think most people don’t know when to use “lay” and “lie,” I could see a character using the former when s/he should use the latter. And sometimes proper grammar reads awkwardly, especially if it’s in dialogue. Still, I understand what you’re saying, and it still bothers me to see grammatical mistakes even when they’re intentional. :p
I solve the Snow Patrol problem by singing along more loudly with the grammatically correct version.
I totally reject this pedantry. I’ve studied philosophy of language, and one of the first lessons learned (in a sub-disciple called pragmatics) is that all language originates in use and advocacy. Meaning: when a group of people reach a de-facto consensus (by means of their using a word or phrase), the game is up. The game may change a decade or century later, but for the time being, it’s up. Grammarians must then decide: fight the consensus use, or notarize it,
Zooming in, the expression, “lay down,” is used widely. My great grandmother in Cincinnati used it, and the kids I grew up with in suburban Florida used it. And many people I’ve met since. I’m sure a linguistic sociologist could document just how widespread it is.
Even putting aside the fact that “lie” and “lay” are etymological cognates (“lay” comes from the Old English for “lie”) with confusing and irregular conjugation rules (so if ever we should resist a unimodal fix, this would be when), there’s the general claim, which I claim, that language is public property, which doesn’t merely originate in use and advocacy, but is shaped by use (and re-use) and advocacy (and re-advocacy) all the way along.
I play with and renovate words for a living. Here’s a poem I wrote about this very question.
Lawnfellows
In old and other words
To know someone is to sleep with
Although to sleep with sounds so innocent
And innocent means harm in knowing
And so here our words are consistently
Inconsistent — we could call it misleading
(Disband any grammarians who say
This was ever settled)
How to lie with, or lay down with
Also meant to sleep with
And here is the platonic exemplar
Two beautiful boys, not yet twenty-five
Asleep on a blanket on a great lawn
Of Central Park, laid down
From who knows what kind of lives
I see no accessories of
In their plain clothes, no one knows
How one’s arm came to rest
Like a tendril, so naturally
Around the other’s chest
You can reject the argument; that’s fine, though I disagree wholeheartedly. I think that adopting grammatically incorrect phrasing into what is considered “correct” is just plain lazy. I’m in no way putting this on the grammarians. I’m simply saying that many people are unwilling to learn correct use of language, and so we must accomodate them by bastardizing the English language.
At any rate, it’s not only the phrase “lay down” that I’m concerned with. I think people ought to be paying a little more attention to what is being said. I’m so tired of hearing people say “learn to speak English or get out of my country!” Dude, most US natives don’t even speak English well.
And to round out a long reply, I’m just going to quote David Foster Wallace:
…you can’t escape language: Language is everything and everywhere; it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another; it’s what separates us from the animals; Genesis 11:7-10 and so on. And we…know when and how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and to keep participles from dangling, and we know that we know, and we know how very few other Americans know this stuff or even care, and we judge them accordingly.
It comes down to snobbery. We speak in many dialects and idioms, even inside American English. The phrase “grammatically incorrect” is philosophically and linguistically incorrect, in the main.
I like broader, more historical views, which makes grammatical pedantry seem moot — in spirit, at least, when not in letter. We human beings invented language and it’s ours to change. No argument can preempt that fact. Not just the Hittites, not just Greeks and Romans, not just Angles and Saxons and Jutes, not just the Norman French, not just Chaucer, and not just Shakespeare were allowed. We all are. We shouldn’t be stuck with the image of English that set into the mold of standard grammar and spelling in the late Northern Renaissance and early Enlightenment. It continues to evolve as long as we continue to use it, unless we insist — bolts thrown down from ivory towers — otherwise.
We figments of this age, as much as any others, get to play with our words. As William James noted, if you don’t believe that, fine. But once you start believing it, you’ll see how the belief has efficacy…
The Snow Patrol song is actually grammatically correct. You use past tense of “lie,” which is “lay,” in the if statement. Similar to “If I ate food, would you eat food with me?”
I’ve just begun reading Pank, so I’m slow with this response to May publication. Lay/lie is even simpler than others suggest. If the sentence has an object, use the lay/laid/laid form. If it doesn’t, use the lie/lay/lain form. No exceptions. I figured this out when I was 11 years old, but had to listen to teachers torturing students endlessly with long-winded instructions and explanations about lie/lay usage. “If the verb refers back to the subject blah blah blah…” Some kids got so confused they grew up believing the correct verb depended on whether the subject or object was animate or inanimate. My own daughter was so confused she thought you wrote “the dead man [inanimate] was laying in the street” while “the injured man [animate] was lying in the street.” Sometimes we need to be saved from well-meaning teachers.
For the record, it should be “arsehole’ not “asshole” and stop putting zeds(they are NOT zees) where there should be esses, as in bastardise, organise or plagiarise. You damn colonials annoy those of us who are correct.(teehee)
Wouldn’t you lay(your body)down? Isn’t your body a direct object? In bed, don’t we get laid after beer has turned our truths to lies? In lying then, some get laid while others just lay there considering better lies, for next time. I’ll lay this aside for now…
For the record, it should be “arsehole’ not “asshole” and stop putting zeds(they are NOT zees) where there should be esses, as in bastardise, organise or plagiarise. You damn colonials annoy those of us who are correct.(teehee)
Indeed on correct usage, but oh my poem “Lay Back Down, My Husband.” I intended the idea of him laying himself down as one would lay down a baby. Thus, (yourself) is the direct object:
Lay (yourself) back down, my husband.
The fog still travels the valley beyond the porch.
And the dew still blooms on the lawn, in the moon
where glowing grass and shadows are weaving,
waiting till the drowsy morning slides open its eye.
Christopher Phelps is absolutely correct. Scholars of language know that many of the supposed grammar “rules” we see today are actually matters of style rather than grammar. They are opinions of individuals in the past who thought that their particular stylistic preferences should be what was “correct.†Unfortunately, most of them are based on unresearched intuition and/or pseudo-historical ideas that turned out to be false when properly researched. One example is the “s” in island. Pseudo-historical “scholars” in the 15th century thought that the English word, “iland” was related to the Latin “insular” but had been “bastardized” and lost its “s” over the years. So they inserted the “s.” It turns out that the English word is not related to the Latin, so the “s” in our modern spelling is just downright wrong, the product of the same intuitive pseudo-historical principles that incorrectly inserted the “b†into subtle and debt, the “o†in people, and many others. These intuitional practices were used by people like John Dryden, Robert Lowth, Lindley Murray, Henry Alford, and many others with no knowledge of historical linguistics, to create many of the “rules” we see today. Another example of a false grammar rule is the supposed distinction between farther and further. The two words were used completely interchangeably until pseudo-historians created an artificial difference. Same with “dangling” prepositions, “split” infinitives, and the list goes on. The supposed distinction between lay and lie is just another example in the long litany of these artificially created, unhistorical “rules.†The two words were used interchangeably until an artificial difference was created (based upon stylistic preferences rather than historical linguistic research). So not only are we stuck today with grammar rules that are not rules, but we’re stuck with people who think they are.
Hate to break it to you, but Chasing Cars got it correct. It’s subjunctive.
The line:
“If I lay here, would you lie with me?”
Means:
“If I were to lie here, would you lie with me?”
Not:
“If I lie here, will you lie with me?”
“Lay” is the subjuctive form of the verb “to lie.” The verb “to lay” does not appear in the song. It’s the same construction as “If I sat here, would you sit with me?” as opposed to “If I sit here, will you sit with me?”
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