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This might have been discussed here before, but I want to bring it up again (and I'm too lazy to look up whether it has actually been discussed before). As an informal survey, how many among us hear laid used more often than lay is as the past tense for the intransitive verb lie (meaning: rest or in a horizontal position or prostrate)?
I had lay drummed into me at an early age as the past tense for that version of lie, so I use it, though, sadly, not invariably. However, I have noticed that very few people use the "correct" past tense for that definition of lie. The correct usage seems to be becoming archaic. It wouldn't be a big deal -- words fall into disuse all the time -- except that there is a present-tense verb lay, and the differing uses may be confusing.
So, when I was an English teacher, I taught the words thus (listed in order of present, past, and predicate):
lie (meaning to be horizontal or recumbent): lie; lay (laid); lain
lay (transitive, to put an object on a flat surface): lay; laid; laid
lie (to prevaricate, make false statements): lie; lied; lied
The parentheses around the initial "laid" was because I taught my students that most people used laid as the past tense for lie, and my job was to help them communicate in their world. I taught them the correct way, but I emphasized the "wrong" way. Any thoughts?
There was some discussion of this in "A Walk Spoiled But Our Lie is Good".
Personally, I am rather conservative when it comes to English usage, so I prefer to use "lay" for the past tense of "lie". However, I also insist that "whom" is the objective case of "who", "data" is the plural of "datum", and that the traditional American punctuation practice of placing commas and periods inside quotation marks regardless of whether they are part of the quotation leads to factual errors and occasional ambiguity.
tunawrites said:
The parentheses around the initial "laid" was because I taught my students that most people used laid as the past tense for lie, and my job was to help them communicate in their world. I taught them the correct way, but I emphasized the "wrong" way. Any thoughts?
I think this is a very balanced approach to learning. It exposes students to an uneasy truth and allows them to make their own judgments. You do not fall into the trap of allowing your own choices to tint reality to such an extent that your aim becomes misguided to influence students at the cost of truth to agree with you.
A totally unsubstantiated and virtually irrelevant theory of mine is that phonetic context is an agent in this shift. Both lie (intr.) and lay (trans.) are almost always followed by the word down. In such a context, there is only the slightest, if any, difference in sound between He lay down. and He laid down. It could be the similarity of sound, along with the association with lay (trans.), that creates such a well worn path.
Martha Barnette
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