Lie vs Lay

Take that back. I lay in bed today. Edit: ninja. Drat.

My husband hates that I correct him about his lay/lie usage. I hate that he tells the dog to lay down. We all have our crosses to bear.

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It only sounds wrong because, generally, people don’t use it correctly. Be the change.

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I wondered about this.

Perhaps the earliest version was written by George Wheler in his 1698 book The Protestant Monastery, which reads:[1]

Upon lying down, and going to ſleep.

Here I lay me down to ſleep.
To thee, O Lord, I give my Soul to keep,
Wake I ever, Or, Wake I never;
To thee O Lord, I give my Soul to keep for ever.

A later version printed in The New England Primer goes:[2]

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep[;]
If I should die before I 'wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.

you certainly can lay yourself down.

The point is you need to lay something down.

You can’t just lay. You lie.

My wife is a grammarian and keeps me on the straight and narrow. If I use lie or lay incorrectly I hear it from her.

I find the improper use of “good” and “well” more annoying.

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earlier this weekend i learned that johhny cash got a grammy for this album. category? “Best Liner Notes”

sounds like a made up category where they just wanted to give johnny something for helping dylan get all set up and everything in nashville.

but no, it is an actual award they still award. and cash won it the prior year too! so TIL the museum undersold cash’s brilliance in category of “liner Notes”

If the dog had arms he could have told the dog to “lay down your arms” but - dogs don’t have arms.

Some do.

I prefer Lays over Pringles.

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especially asian Lays!!!

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By change, you mean prescriptively following the grammar rules that I learned in primary school?

You lie!

image

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You lay!

The kids try to correct our grammar under the basis that their mother is an EDITOR and she should know. Or was an editor for like 2 months or something. It doesn’t matter at all that she has no actual qualifications and went to college for music. But the real point here is that your parents educational background is not hereditary damnit.

You have to remember that most of us aren’t experts in grammar. We’re laypeople.

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I am usually a grammar nerd but I forget the difference (grammar fail intended)

I also use “I forget” in actual conversation to mean “I forgot and continue to forget”

Anyway to your question I think people use them fairly interchangeably, especially with regional accents and dialects. I use them as appropriate… at least 95% of the time.

With how much air is in each bag of chips, they should just call it Lies.

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lie lay lain; fall fell fallen

lay laid laid; fell felled felled

TIL, fell is a present tense verb.

Funny because that’s what Elden Ring says when you fell a boss.

I think half the obscure words I learned as a kid were from gaming