The Lay of the Lie/Lay Land

(curious music)

Hi, I'm Mary Norris, a copy editor at The New Yorker

and today we're going to get to the bottom of the confusion

between lie and lay.

Lie, as in to fib, is a regular verb.

That means it forms its past tense by adding D on the end.

The principal parts are lie, lied, has lied.

Okay?

I lie all the time.

I lied yesterday.

The day before I had lied to my mother.

Lay is a transitive verb.

The verb transfers some action

between the subject of the sentence, I,

and the object, the pencil.

I lay the pencil down.

The verb wouldn't be complete without an object.

The past tense of lay is laid.

The past perfect, had laid.

So that's another easy one, right?

Lay, laid, laid.

Now it gets a little complicated.

You've probably all heard the song

by Bob Dylan, Lay Lady Lay.

Well, Bob Dylan is evoking some poetic license in that lyric

♫ Lay, lady, lay,

♫ Lay across my big brass bed

Strictly speaking, it should have been, Lie, lady, lie.

He means not the transitive verb, lay

but the intransitive verb, lie, which means recline.

Dylan is not alone in this and he may have taught

a lot of people to use the wrong form of the verb.

The verb to lie is intransitive.

An intransitive verb reflects back on the subject,

it does not take an object.

I lie here.

I recline here.

The other thing is that it's a highly irregular verb.

It's lie, I lie down today.

And lay, I lay down yesterday.

And the past perfect is lain.

The day before yesterday he had lain down for several hours.

People are so used to substituting lay for lie.

For instance, we tell a dog, Lay down, boy, right?

And the dog, of course too, can be forgiven

for not understanding English grammar.

Even the most expert grammarian

sometimes gets these wrong in speech

but when we're writing them down

and putting them in print, we have a chance

to get them exactly right

and I have an example here of the verb to lie

within two paragraphs of a piece in The New Yorker.

Fugedy thinks that the electrodes move around less

if you lie down, so I lay on the examination table

and slipped the electrodes underneath the Velcro headband.

A little farther along, My thoughts turned to the many

patients who must have lain on this same white table..

Easy.

Okay?

See you next time.