You look at your dog, command, “Lay down!” and your dog does nothing. Great! The dog knows grammar and he knows you’re wrong.
The number of people who don’t know when to use “lay” or “lie” is climbing as fast as the birth rate. In the past week I’ve heard a politician, a teacher, a minister, and a newsreader on NPR get it wrong. NPR! The last fortress of correct English! I hear a giant toilet flushing, we are all going down the drain.
Aren’t sure when to use ‘lay’ and ‘lie’? You certainly aren’t alone. Here are three ways, neither involve any grammar. I won’t make you diagram sentences, either.
1. The lazy way. Use ‘lie’ all the time. You’ll be wrong only a tiny fraction of the time.
2. The substitute way. Fool yourself and substitute “sit” or “set” in the sentence. It makes it easier. If you use ‘sit’ then you can use ‘lie,’ if you are sure it’s ‘set’ then you can use ‘lay.’
Here are some examples for sit/lie: Sit down. When I came in, he was sitting on the floor. Let’s sit down together and figure it out.
Here are some examples for set/lay: Please set the bowl on the table. Set your tired bones on that chair, let’s sit and talk for a while. Once you set down the wine glass, pick up a pretzel.
2. The easy way. ‘Lie’ means to recline. You want your dog to recline, so you say, “Lie down!” You are tired so you lie down for a nap. The paper is lying next to the pen.
‘Lay’ means to place. ‘Lay the pen on the table.’ You then lay the paper next to it. You can even pick up your dog and lay him on the table, too, because you are doing the placing. And finally, when you place yourself in bed, you can say, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.” Notice you are adding ‘me’ to the sentence, you are placing yourself. If you were reclining, it would be, ‘Now I lie down to sleep.’
Listen up, Doreen, Tandaleo, Sidsel, Sarah, Lisa. You can do this. I know you can, because you lay it on the line for us every day.
–Quinn McDonald is a writer and trainer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007-9 All rights reserved. Diagram of “Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep” courtesy logos.com
Oh yes, thank you. I have struggled with this forever despite the best efforts years ago of my Catholic nun English and grammar teachers’ to get it into my brain cells.
Writing my novel, I always wrote the incorrect one and my beloved co-author would always catch it and has tried countless times to teach me!!!
This is easy! You are a genius at clarifying things, beloved Quinn
Donna
The misuse of lie and lay is something that really bothers me. Another one is its and it’s. The possessive pronoun is its, as in its bone. It’s is a contraction for it is. It’s cold today. Since we use an apostrophe to indicate possessive in nouns, Peter’s toy, somehow it leads to confusion in the pronoun. But hey, you don’t say hi’s toy, either. Or it’s her’s.
I’ve begun to see pretty elementary grammatical mistakes in Newsweek, so I agree the language seems to be going to pot.
Thank you, thank you. I’ve always mangled the use of those two words because because I’ve never found anyone else who knew the correct usage. Your explanation is the clearest I’ve heard.
Perfect example, Pete. But I don’t want to hear the one about getting laid.
Once there was a man who had a dog. The dog gave every indication of being very friendly, but whenever people visited, the dog would go up to them, very friendly still, tail wagging, and bite them. The man finally concluded that this dog’s body language was simply untruthful. So the next time he had visitors, he noticed his dog snoozing on the carpet and asked his guests to tiptoe to the next room where they conversed in a whisper until he closed the door to the other room.
“Why are you doing that?” asked one guest.
“Well,” said the man, “I’ve learned it’s better to let lying dogs sleep.”
http://www.nysun.com/article/61711
They don’t teach grammar anymore. It is a sad state of affairs, certainly. If the NPR reporters are from the most recent generation to graduate from our school system, they won’t have been taught grammar – and some details about word usage just aren’t going to be picked up by chance. My children have been taught more about grammar when they have taken German in school than they have learned about English, their native language. I finally bought some homeschooling grammar books to supplement my dyslexic 10th grader’s education, because the school system certainly isn’t teaching him these things!