In an alarming abuse of police power, a team of Santa Monica officers stormed into a crime scene and ordered several suspected assailants to make love on the floor. How do I know this? Because I’m the editor who approved the story that ran in the newspaper. And once something appears in print, who am I to say it’s untrue?
Of course, that wasn’t the story I intended to run. I didn’t even realize what I had printed until a reader called it to my attention.
“You meant to write, ‘Police ordered the suspects to lie on the floor.’ But you wrote, ‘to lay.’ I’m quite sure that the police did not tell the assailants to have sex.” (I don’t have the note from the reader, so I’m paraphrasing from memory. I may be getting his or her wording all wrong, but it’s in print now, and therefore fact.)
A few years later I was in an airport shuttle bus in Paris. Two retired couples, Americans, were sharing the ride. Americans in Paris always seem really happy to meet each other. Perhaps that’s because no one else seems too happy about our being there. Unfooled by my saucy beret and white-and-black-striped shirt, these nice people pegged me as a fellow Yank and struck up a conversation. One man asked what I did for a living. When I told him I was a copy editor, he lit up in a way that made it immediately obvious that he had a score to settle with his companions.
“Tell me: What are the most commonly confused words in the English language?”
“Oh,” I answered very casually, “ ‘to lay’ and ‘to lie.’ ”
The man’s face glowed in triumph as he gave a checkmating nod to his companions.
Honestly, I don’t know why I came up with that answer or how it happened that he and I were on the same wavelength. I could have as easily said, “healthy and healthful,” “bananas and plantains,” or “religion and morality.” But around 5:30 a.m. what popped out of my half-conscious brain was “to lay and to lie.”
The difference between these two words is easy. Very easy. Setting aside the definition of “to lie” that means “to tell a fib,” “to lie” is something I do to myself. “To lay” is something I do to something—or, ahem, someone—else. I lie on the beach. I lay the book on the table.
To use them correctly, you don’t need to know that this is the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. You don’t need to know that a transitive verb requires a direct object, such as the book in the above example, or that an intransitive verb requires no object. For example, you don’t need to know that the main definition of “to walk” is an intransitive verb because you can simply say, “I walk.” But like a lot of verbs, “to walk” doubles as a transitive verb, because in a slightly different meaning of the word you might say, “I walk the dog.” And you absolutely don’t need to know that’s why so many verbs in the dictionary have the abbreviations “vt,” for “verb, transitive,” and “vi,” for “verb, intransitive.” All you need to know to understand the difference between “to lay” and “to lie” is that the first one is done to something or someone else and the second one you do to yourself.
Of course, that’s too easy. So there’s a catch. The past tense of “to lie” just happens to be “lay.” So, though you would say, “Today I lie on the beach,” in the past tense you’d say, “Yesterday I lay on the beach.” And from there, a whole world of confusion arises. For example, where does “lain” come in? And what or who, exactly, gets laid?
Don’t be afraid. The other forms of these two words are also relatively easy. They are inflected (as the grammar books like to put it) as follows:
lay-laid-laid
lie-lay-lain
That means that both the past tense and the past participle of “lay” are “laid.” “Today the suspects lay their guns on the floor.” “Yesterday the suspects laid their guns on the floor.” “At times the suspects have laid their guns on the floor.”
Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: “To lay is to get laid and laid.” (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Monica police officer might read into it.)
“To lie,” then, works as follows. “Today I lie on the beach.” “Yesterday I lay on the beach.” “At times, I have lain on the beach.” None of those acts puts me in any danger of being arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior. But that’s only because I conjugated the verb correctly.
I tried to explain this difference to the reporter who wrote the article. I explained “lay” versus “lie” and, in the process, mentioned that “lay” happens to be the past tense of “lie.” That last bit of information might have confused him but, either way, he didn’t get it.
“But when I wrote that police ‘ordered them to lay,’ that was in the past,” he said.
That kind of blew my mind because suddenly the easy and intuitive process of putting actions into the past—something we all do every day without thinking—seemed like rocket science. My reporter friend was failing to see that he, himself, would never accidentally say, “I wanted to drove to the store,” or “The teacher told them to thought about it.”
We create verb phrases such as the ones above by adding a simple past tense of one verb—“told,” “wanted”—to an infinitive of another verb—“to drive,” “to think.” The infinitive never changes.
Therefore, when you’re talking about people lying on a floor, someone may have ordered them “to lie” on the floor. And yes, that’s in the past tense. But the word after the “to” in the infinitive, in this case “lie,” never changes. That’s just how we make verbs, and it should not be confused with how Santa Monica police officers make headlines or how crime suspects make whoopee.