![]() It’s an archaic spelling that is now considered incorrect, so don’t even think about writing about something being layed down, okay? Thank you.) Lie vs. (As for layed, which we’ve also seen in different articles and posts - just forget about it. Okay, so far so good…but it gets a bit more sticky when you look at the tenses.Īs we said before, in the past tense lie becomes lay, and lay becomes laid…which is also the past participle of lay. In the case of Eric Clapton’s Sally, if he was saying “lay down your head, Sally,” it would be fine. And that’s how it works with lay: you lay something down - your head, a book, whatever. You wouldn’t just say, “I hit.” You hit what? Whatever that “what” is is essential to its meaning. If it doesn’t have an object, it doesn’t make sense. You can lie down on the bed, on the couch, on the ground, on whatever you want, but the act of lying is complete all by itself.Ī transitive verb, on the other hand, does have an object connected to it, something or someone the verb is doing something to. ![]() In other words, it doesn’t do anything to anyone or anything. An intransitive verb doesn’t have an object. What’s the difference between an intransitive and a transitive verb? This makes all the difference in their usage. It’s because lie and lay are two different kinds of verbs: One of them, lie, is intransitive, and the other, lay, is transitive. Why can’t that lady lay across Dylan’s bed? And how is it that “lied down” is wrong … but “laid down” is wrong too? Speaking of being completely disoriented, you might feel like that at this point too, wondering why these examples are incorrect. Her mother Julia Eller said that after her daughter had jogged three or four miles on the trail, she laid down on a log to rest, and when she got up, was completely disoriented. Or they put in a laid … which is also wrong. Protesters lied down in a “die-in” and then confronted Chambers during Monday’s meeting, where he sat between two empty chair Then there are the cases where someone gets confused with the past tense of lie and puts in a lied - which is the past tense of the other lie, the not-telling-the-truth one, but not of the reclining horizontally lie. But he should tell Sally to lie down, not lay down. ![]() Same goes for Eric Clapton’s classic rock song, “Lay Down, Sally,” which correctly should be “Lie Down, Sally.” If Clapton told Sally, “Lay down my guitar,” he would have been right. It should be “Lie, Lady, Lie.” No, it doesn’t sound nearly as good, and it might be seen as meaning Dylan wanted the lady to tell a falsehood instead of lying down with him in his big brass bed, but it would be correct. Often it’s a lay that’s put in when it should be a lie, as in the title of Bob Dylan’s song “Lay, Lady Lay.” Bob might have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he definitely wouldn’t win a Nobel Prize for grammar if there were one. So you’re definitely not alone if you get a little shaky when you’re debating whether it should be lie or lay, lay or laid (or layed?) or lied, not to mention lay down or lie down, and so on. News & World Report and the New York Post, to name just a few). lie - It’s confusing for (almost) everyoneįamous musicians do it (raise your hands, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton), as do major media outlets (we’re looking at you, U.S. (Look, at least the past tense of lay isn’t lie.) It’s enough to make you want to lay (or should it be lie?*) down your head and cry. Lie and lay sound similar, they look similar, their meanings are similar, and don’t get us started on the similarities between their different tenses. It’s easy to get confused in spite of their different meanings. Nice and simple, right? But even so, people fall into the lie vs. Lie means “to be in a horizontal or resting position on something (a bed or the ground) or to get into that position.” Lay means “to put something down.” ![]() After all, lie and lay are two very different words with two very different meanings. If you were going to list the most commonly confused and misused words in English, lie and lay would definitely rank near the top. ![]()
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