OK, grammar geek time. A huge pet peeve of mine is lie/lay conjugation and construction errors. I don’t know what to say: memorize them and practice them until they sound right in your ear? Or read more?
1. to lie, intransitive, meaning “to intentionally tell a falsehood”: I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lied yesterday, I have lied.
2. to lie, intransitive, meaning “to be prone or supine”: I lie, he lies, I am lying, I lay yesterday, I have lain.
3. to lay, transitive, meaning “to cause something to lie”: I lay it, he lays it, I am laying it, I laid it yesterday, I have laid it.
Is that messy? Yes. Is it hard to remember? Yes. Will it always be this way? Maybe not. Is it still the case that you will sound like a dolt if you mess this up? Oh, yes.
Please scrutinize the above table. In none of these verbs is there an intransitive simple present of the form “lay”. There is only a transitive one. So if you say “I want to lay down,” my brain is waiting for an object, and when it doesn’t come, my brain tumbles a bit. The educated ear is expecting something like “I want to lay down the remote control and go outside.” If you mean that you desire to intentionally become horizontal, you say “I want to lie down.”
Likewise, you cannot say “He went in the back and laid down.” That, too, needs an object: again, something like “he went in the back and laid down the law,” which, while pretty awesome-sounding, is almost certainly not what you meant. If you expressing a simple past action, you say “He went in the back and lay down.”
You do not say “my cat is laying on me”, unless you mean that you have some weird atavistic female feline who produces eggs instead of live kittens.
And you will explode some people’s skulls if you say “He went and lied down”. That’s … just … that’s completely wrong. It’s up there with “Me and you’re cousin’s am gonna go bring the dog to the vet for it’s shots.”
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