Laying down rules of using ‘lie’ and ‘lay’

A reader reports that he often finds the words lie and lay confused in use.

Yes, they are troublesome. Take the verb to lie. It has two quite unrelated meanings. The first is to utter a deliberate untruth, to cheat, to deceive – as a rule, verbally, that is, by means of words.

Such dishonesty is called a lie (noun). To belie is to falsify, to disguise, to camouflage, to fail to justify, to disappoint.

To give the lie to is to accuse of lying or to prove the falsity (of, say, a statement). This lie is derived from the Old English lyge (noun) and leogan (verb).

But to lie also means to be or to place oneself in a prostrate position on the ground or some other (horizontal) surface. This other lie has quite a different etymology.

It comes from the Old English lecgan, related to the Old High German ligen. The word oneself reminds us that, here, to lie is a self-“action”. Lake Victoria lies, by its own “initiative”, in East Africa.

DIFFERENCE

To lie is intransitive. The subject or “doer” (Lake Victoria) has no object. Rather, the subject has become the object.

That is precisely where the difference lies between to lie and to lay. The latter is not a self-action. It requires an agency.

A brick lies (in a building). But it is the builder who lays (or laid) it there. Our laws lie in a document.But it is the MPs who lay them there. It is they who lay down the law. To lay is thus transitive: It requires an object (here, “our laws”).

The difference between to lie and to lay is also seen in their past tense forms. In line with its two meanings, to lie has two – lied (“cheated”) and lay (“went horizontal”). That is where the confusion lies.

For lay (the past tense of one meaning of lie) is the same word as lay (the present tense of the verb which means to cause to lie).

For the learner may be more bewildered when the teacher calmly reminds him that the past tense of this latter lay is not lied but laid!

That’s right. Never confuse them. It is lied for one lie, lay for the other lie and laid for lay! (“Never shake thy gory locks at me!”)

APPLICATION

Indeed, if you add to this lay the adjective lay (“non-clerical”, “belonging to the laity”) and the noun lay (a song), you may marvel at the poverty of a language which forces a poor little word to perform about a million Herculean “Labours”.

A person who lies (cheats) is a liar. But a person who lies (in bed) is… what? – a lier? Never heard of it! However, an agent who lays is a layer. A builder is a bricklayer.

But I can’t recall if Dame Partlet the Hen (of literature) was an egg-layer! Other layers include the thickness of homogeneous matter that an artist may lay by adding another coat of paint and the strata – the bands of igneous rock – that geological time may lay.

The writer is a veteran journalist