JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #44
March 18, 2021
I thought this week for no good reason I’d write briefly about the confusion between the verbs lie and lay. In spoken English, the distinction between these verbs has more or less vanished, and only pedants really insist on maintaining the difference when we speak. On the other hand, pedants rule the world of writing and insist on adhering to historical form as much as possible, so it’s useful for writers to understand what’s going on with these verbs.
First things first, definitions. In their pertinent meanings, lie means to be recumbent, whereas lay means to cause something to be recumbent. So we should say, The paper lies on the table, but, I lay the paper onto the table. Importantly, lie is intransitive because it describes the state of the verb’s subject (the paper lies), while lay is transitive, where the subject acts upon the object of the verb in order to affect it (I lay the paper). One easy way to remember which is which is to recall the prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep." Here, the supplicant describes acting upon themself as both subject and object of the verb (I lay me down), reminding us that lay is the transitive, causative version of the verb.
Now the interesting part. Why does English do this? Notice that there are a few pairs of verbs that act in this way, with an intransitive version and a transitive version with a causative meaning. Thus, we use the verb sit to describe what something is doing, but set as the causative version where we cause something to sit. Another pair is fall and fell, where fell means to cause something to fall: he felled the tree. And rise-raise follows this same pattern. The lie-lay pair is simply one of many in this class of verbs, but because the distinction is vanishing from speech (the sit-set distinction is vanishing somewhat as well, but more slowly), we lose the ability to intuit the differences. The causative version of each pair has either the /e/ or /ε/ vowel to mark it, which is a holdover from a long-ago grammatical system of the language that gradually became what is now English. These words are survivors from that distant past. Another pair is drink and drench, but the meaning of drench has drifted a bit.
Another complication arises because the past tense form of lie is lay, while the past tense of lay is laid. (Notice also that the past tense of fall is fell, but the past tense of fell is felled. In most cases, the intransitive version of each pairing has an irregular past form [e.g. rise-rose], while the causative, transitive version has a regular past form [raise-raised].) So, Now I lay me down is correct (not Now I lie me down), but Yesterday I lay me down is incorrect (it should be Yesterday I laid me down), and Yesterday I lay down is correct (not Yesterday I laid down). Then there are the participles, which are lain and laid. Yikes. You can see why the distinction is all but gone in speech and has been vanishing for a long, long time--literally centuries. Only the work of educated pedants preserves these distinctions in written form. Alack!
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