Lying Like Snow

First of all, “lie” is intransitive, “lay” transitive. I lie down, but I lay me down, and, for that matter, I lay all kinds of other things down too—the pen, usually, and sometimes my knife and fork. (The problem with the “lay me down” example is that it’s semantically a red-herring: that is, it happens, quite adventitiously, to refer to the same action involved in simply lying down, but that has nothing to do with grammar, of course. Better to think of the pen and knife and fork.)

Of course, things worsen from here. For “lay” happens to be the past tense of “lie” as well as being the present tense of…well, “lay.” “I lay down on the bed,” “I lay on the riverbank and dreamed of Debbie,” etc. And the past tense of the “lay” that’s present tense is “laid”: “I laid down my fork,” “Here the master laid down his pen” (written as I recall, in a posthumous manuscript of Bach), and, yes, “I got laid.” (I’m not being salacious, as I hope you recognize. It’s just that a further semantic confusion enters here, for people often get laid lying down.)

Finally, the past participle of “lie” is “lain”—“I had lain down for a nap when I remembered the pen I’d laid down,” for “laid” happens to be the past participle of “lay” as well as its past tense. Remember the exchange in Beckett’s “Endgame,” in which Clov discovers a flea in his trousers, Hamm commands him to kill it at once, Clov does so, and Hamm asks if the flea is dead. “Unless he’s laying doggo,” Clov says. “Lying,” Hamm says, “lying doggo.” “One says ‘lying’? One doesn’t say ‘laying’?” “Use your head,” Hamm says. “If it were laying we’d be bitched.” More or less: I’m doing it from memory.

And that’s it. Absolutely authoritative, as though I myself had lain down this law (“law” is a cognate of “lay,” of course) though in fact I’m just playing it as it lays (a familiar expression which turns out to be a misusage, doesn’t it?). There’s no one will say I lie.

Richard Tristman
Lay Linguist
                                                             

(I love this essay by Richard—professor, writer, and father of my best friend of over 20 years. I post it here in honor of his memory.)