MISUSE OF “LIE” AND “LAY” CAN PUNCTURE YOUR COMMAND OF ENGLISH

I - Troublesome English verbs that trip even professional writers

In English, there are two sound-alike and spelled-alike verbs that often cause a lot of confusion--the verb-pair “lie” and “lay.” Indeed, who hasn’t been tripped yet by these two verbs? Over the years, I would often come across writing even by professionals—essays, business reports, position papers, news and feature stories—where “lie” is mistaken for “lay,” and vice versa. The semantic damage to the sentence might be slight, but the misuse of either word nevertheless shows a glaring hole in the writer’s command of English.

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II - Why we get into trouble using the verbs “lie” and “lay”

The verbs “lie” and “lay” often get annoyingly misused because (1) they both consist of three letters and are pronounced almost identically, and (2) it isn't easy to figure out whether they are being used intransitively or transitively. 

Most troublesome is the first “lie,” an intransitive verb which means “to stay at rest horizontally,” followed in troublesomeness by the transitive verb “lay,” which means “to put or set something down.” 

Of course there's another intransitive verb that's also spelled “lie.” It means “to assert something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.”  As it causes trouble altogether different from that wrought by “lie” and “lay,” we won't take it up here.

The intransitive “lie” is most commonly misused when wrongly forced by the writer or speaker to function as a transitive verb in sentences like this one: “The ousted manager went to his office and laid on the couch.” The correct usage here is, of course, the intransitive past tense “lay”: “The ousted manager went to his office and lay on the couch.” 

On the other hand, the intransitive, past tense “lay down” is often mistakenly used in sentences like this: “The rebels surrendered and lay down their arms.” This time, the correct usage is the transitive, past-tense “laid down”: “The rebels surrendered and laid down their arms.”

Often, too, the intransitive present tense verb “lay” is misused in sentences like this one: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite lay in the Pacific Ocean.” The correct usage here is the transitive, plural present tense “lie”: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite lie in the Pacific Ocean.”

Why are “lie” and “lay” such problematic verbs? To find out, let’s once again clearly distinguish between intransitive and transitive verbs.

A verb is intransitive when it doesn’t need a direct object to work properly in a sentence, as is the case with “yawned”: “During his trial, the unrepentant criminal often yawned.” Here, “yawned” is clearly intransitive. It doesn’t need a direct object, and the sentence is complete without one.

On the other hand, a verb is transitive when it absolutely needs a direct object to receive its action, as is the case with “grip” in this sentence: “He gripped my arm.” Drop the direct object of such verbs and the sentence no longer makes sense: “He gripped.”

Now, the problem with “lie” and “lay” is that apart from the fact that they have somewhat overlapping meanings, they are also highly irregular verbs that inflect or change forms in such unpredictable, confusing ways.

The intransitive “lie,” in the sense of staying at rest horizontally, inflects as follows: “lies” for the singular present tense, as in “She chokes when she lies down”; “lie” for the plural present tense, as in “They choke when they lie down”; “lay” for the past tense, whether singular or plural, as in “She got tired and lay down”; and the past participle “lain” in the perfect tenses, as in “She has lain all day while her husband is away.” Take note that none of the usages of “lie” above has a direct object.

Now here’s how the transitive “lay,” in the sense of setting something down, inflects: “lays” for the singular present tense, as in “She meticulously lays breakfast for us”; “lay” for the plural present tense, as in “They meticulously lay breakfast for us”; “laid” for the past tense, as in “We laid our laptops on the table”; and the past participle “laid” for the perfect tenses, as in “They had laid their laptops aside by the time their manager arrived.” Here, every usage of “lie” has a direct object.

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Take note that among these inflections, the past tense form of the intransitive “lie”—“lay”—is exactly the same as that of the present tense plural of the transitive “lay”—also “lay.” It is this quirk of the language that makes it difficult for us to see whether “lie” or “lay” is being used transitively or intransitively, so we must be very careful indeed when using these two highly irregular verbs. 

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The discussions above first appeared in a two-part series in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in September 2007, © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.