Lay or lie

Lay or lie?

If you are tuned in to the Electric Editors list (visit <www.electriceditors.net/edline/index.htm> for info), you might have noticed a recent posting about the differences between lay and lie. There are meanings of both words that I won’t go into here (“this is a family newspaper”, etc), but it is interesting to reflect on the area of overlap.

As verbs, both have some reference to “putting something into a recumbent position”. In grammatical terms, the difference is one of transitiveness. Lie is intransitive (takes no object), and necessarily is something one does to oneself. Lay is transitive (takes an object), and is usually something one does to other things (OK: or people… goodness, what low minds you have!)

To illustrate: “I’m going to lie down for a while”, but “I’m going to lay the baby on the mattress”. People lie down; chickens lay eggs. And so on.

The EDline posting I’m referring to took the view that to confuse these words is a solecism of the lowest order. But I remember, from my childhood, a prayer that began “Now I lay me down to sleep…” There’s also the apparent intransitive exception in “I’m going to lay the table for dinner”. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is simply this: language changes. You could look at “Now I lay me down” from several angles — for example, when an object refers to the same entity as the subject, the reflexive form (in this case “myself”) should be used. But there’s no getting away from the fact that, in today’s English, we always use lie instead of lay myself. And nowadays we set, rather than lay, tables. A reliable dictionary can tell us how language was used at the date the dictionary was prepared; we still have to be ready to think about what might have changed between then and now. (In some forms of writing, of course, we need to be consistent with earlier rather than current usage.)

As always, the key to appropriate use of language is thinking about what we are doing. You might have noticed, in the first sentence of this column, “tuned in to”. Why did I write “in to” as two words, instead of “into” (one word)?

My reason is that “in” is an integral part of “tuned in” (an example of a phrasal verb); “in” and “to” contribute separate meanings, which are lost in the combined form “into”. “Tuned in to X” does not mean the same as “tuned into X”. Here’s a similar example: “He turned in to bed” is different from “he turned into a frog”. This example clearly illustrates the difference between the separate meanings of “in” and “to” in one case, and the single meaning of “into” in the other.