If you can lay your hands on a tablecloth, you can lay the table; you can then lay your cards on it; you can lay money on the strong possibility that someone will lay a gas pipeline through that beautiful countryside; you can warn someone that if they lay a finger on your sister you’ll lay them out; you can lay your life on the line; you can even, if you are oviparous – a pigeon, say, or a shark, or a boa constrictor – lay eggs; but you cannot, no matter how sleepy you are, lay down on the ground, sofa or bed, even if you lay there last night.
I’m not trying to limit your freedom with an arbitrary set of rules: just alerting you to another of those nasty little traps that the English language likes to lay in your path.
Lay is two different words.
1: The first is the infinitive and base form of a verb that describes the action of putting or placing something on or under a surface, and it is ALWAYS transitive. And I mean, ALWAYS! (Oh, alright: very, very nearly always.) That means that it (very, very nearly) always needs to be followed, straight away, by a direct object. It’s only mildly irregular – lay / laid / laid – following the pattern of say and pay, with the same vowel sounds as the latter (/eɪ/ in all cases).
If you are a bricklayer, you build walls by laying one brick on top of another; if you want to imitate the chivalrous action of Sir Walter Raleigh, you will lay your coat over a mud puddle to save your Queen from dirtying her shoes. The word has a number of idiomatic uses: to test your knowledge of these, find examples in the first paragraph of this article that mean: (a) risk your very existence; (b) knock someone unconscious (slang); (c) touch someone, minimally; (d) cover and prepare a surface for the serving of a meal; (e) find something; (f) give a frank exposition of your interests or intentions.
So what’s the exception? When can lay be intransitive? Well, remember that oviparous business? You can say “My hen isn’t laying.“ The word “eggs” remains implied, tucked inside the verb, like the eggs inside the hen.
2: Lay is the past tense form of the intransitive verb to lie, meaning to place oneself in a horizontal position, or – for objects or locations – to be in a certain place: These are the various forms of the verb:
I sometimes holiday in Jidkarabad, which lies to the East of Kadjirabad. When I go on holiday I usually lie on the beach, although I have never lain* on the beach in Jidkarabad, as lying on beaches is illegal there. Last year the police arrested 250 people as they lay sunbathing.
*I should mention that the use of the past participle lain does not come naturally to most 21st Century English speakers. It’s correct, and there is no really acceptable alternative, but if you Google the above phrase, “I have never lain”, you will find only 372,000 examples on the whole of the Web (compared with 11,500,000 examples of “I have never stood”). In fact, most examples of the word “lain” that you will find are either biblical quotations (from an English text written in the 17th Century) or grammatical explanations, for foreigners and native English speakers, of how to use the verb lie… Lain just sounds rather strange and archaic to modern Anglophone ears, and we tend to avoid constructions where we would be forced to use it.
(And yes, before you ask: lie is also another, quite separate, intransitive verb, meaning to say things that are not true. This verb is regular. As you might imagine, Shakespeare had a lot of fun mixing these two meanings – as in this exchange between Romeo and Mercutio, who says that he had a dream…
MERCUTIO: …That dreamers often lie
ROMEO: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.)
Here’s the problem: In the chorus of one of his most famous songs, Bob Dylan gives us the lines “Lay, lady, lay/Lay across my big brass bed”; and if you do a little Google-research you will find that the phrase “I was laying in bed…” appears in over THREE MILLION places on the 'net.
It seems unlikely that any of three million writers of this sentence (most of them, I fear, native English speakers), or indeed the object of Mr. Dylan’s invitation, were chickens. And so we must grit our teeth and accept – as most authorities now do – that this intransitive usage of lay, although incorrect, is so widespread that it cannot be ignored. People say lay instead of lie. And, the way the English language tends to develop over time, with usage leading the way and the lexicographers and grammarians following, it seems probable that the rules I have just explained will, at some point, have to be re-written.
But, for now, what do we do? We lay down the law. We list the above usage in dictionaries next to red-flag words like “non-standard” and “proscribed”, and make it quite clear that it may be okay for our cherished rules to be challenged, or ignored, by Mr. Dylan (as they were 400 years ago by Shakespeare), but not (at least for another century or so) by you or me.
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