The Pedant Dame is on the warpath again…

Nowadays, many native English speakers seem to be confused between the verbs to lie and to lay. (Speakers of English as a foreign language probably learn their verbs properly so are less likely to make these mistakes.)

Bigstock-57446912.jpg

Take for example this highlighted text from the Online Oxford English Dictionary (to which I am indebted for several screenshots in this blog):

What is wrong with that quote? Apart from…well…everything?

Let’s start at the beginning, with the common verbs, “to lie” and “to lay”.

Verbs are simple? Not. To lie and to lay

Lord Byron on his Deathbed by Odevaere c 1826

The verb “to lie” has various meanings including to tell untruths. But the meaning we’re concerned with here is the sense of being in or assuming a horizontal position. 

Like Byron, shown here as he lay on his deathbed.

Present tense: I/you lie, he lies, we/you/they lie, I (etc) am lying
Past tense: I/you/he/we/they lay
Past participle: I/you have lain, he has lain, we/you/they have lain. 

In my description of Byron, I was using the past tense of the verb to lie. But you saw that at once, didn’t you?

In this sense, the verb to lie does not take an object but is often part of a phrase such as lie down, lie ahead, lie in/on a place. With me so far?

Image by Tim Mossholder from Pixabay

The verb “to lay” generally means
to put [something] down or
to set [something} in a position to be used.

So we can have sentences like:
I am laying my hand on hers
he lays the table/lays the fire
a professional laid the carpet.

There should always be a [something] to tell us what the verb refers to, ie the thing being laid, like my hand, the table, the fire, the carpet.

And we have the following:

Present tense: I/you/we/you/they lay [something], he lays [something], I (etc) am laying [something]
Past tense: I/you/he/we/you/they laid [something]
Past participle: I/you/we/they have laid [something], he has laid [something]

And here you can see where the confusion arises, can’t you? Same word, different meanings.

To lie: present lie, past lay, past participle lain
To lay: present lay, past laid, past participle laid

Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Resolving the verbal confusion

Actually, resolving the confusion isn’t that easy. Why? Because misuse of the verb lay is now widespread. You can’t rely on knowing what sounds right, because often what you will be hearing (or reading) is wrong. The OED doesn’t generally call out such mistakes in the use of lay in anything other than very mild terms—”a nonstandard substitute for lie, its identity of form with the past tense of the latter no doubt accounting largely for the confusion.”

The Apple dictionary is more forthright, as you can see from the screenshot below:

What help can I offer here so that you can avoid making mistakes with lay?

Pedantique-Ryter Rule 1 for deciding whether it’s the verb to lie or to lay:

If there is no [something] after the verb, then use the verb lie [lie, lying, lay, lain]

and you will almost certainly get it right. Here are a couple of examples:

Image by Dirk Wohlrabe from Pixabay

Wine merchants may talk of wines “lying abroad”. By that, they mean wine that a customer has bought from a vineyard or supplier but which has not yet been imported and therefore the customer has not yet paid the duty and VAT that will be due on those wines. There is no [something] in that phrase so it uses the verb “to lie”.

But a customer may also “lay down wines” in the sense of cellaring them until they are at their best for drinking. In that case, there is definitely a [something] being laid (down), namely the wines. So “to lay” is the correct verb.

In that first quotation I circled for you, it was incorrect to say “we decided to lay low”. There is no [something] in that sentence, is there? The correct English would be “we decided to lie low”. They were, after all, choosing to hide. Nothing to do with setting something down.

Which brings me on to the other abomination in that circled quote…

nuthawut – stock.adobe.com

Nouns: lie or lay?

All the quotations in the first OED screenshot refer to “the lay of the land”.

Pedantique-Ryter Rule 2:

“the lay of the land” is always wrong. ALWAYS.
The correct phrase is “the lie of the land”.

The lie of the Exmoor land by Sarah Mallory

When you think about it, it’s obvious. The “lie of the land” means the position or way or direction in which the land is lying. No one has set it down there. It has a position, a direction, a shape. It just IS. There is no [something] here. And I’m glad to say that the online OED has far more quotes using the correct formulation than the wrong one. Here are a few of them:

Think of a golf ball where we also talk about “the lie”. It’s a bad lie, say, because the ball is in deep rough. To my knowledge, no golf commentator has yet made the mistake of referring to “a bad lay”.

pixabay-22563-golf-83869_1280

But there’s still time for such a pestiferous infection to manifest itself, I suppose?

There is a noun lay, though it is incorrect to use it to mean position, like a golf lie. It has loads of different meanings, though most of them aren’t used much nowadays. It can mean a poem intended to be sung like The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Walter Scott, 1805). Lay can mean lay people, the laity, though that usage is obsolete. It can mean arable land under grass though, for that, it is usually spelled lea or ley rather than lay. It can also be a variant of the nautical term lee, meaning shelter, as “in the lee of”.

But it is never, ever right to use it instead of “the lie of the land”. Got it?

I do hope so.  Thank you.

I Pedantique-Ryter

PS I fancy the confusion is not helped by the vulgar slang use of the phrase “to get laid” but I have refrained from questioning the OED on that one. If you are interested, feel free to investigate the phrase yourself.