Writing It Right: Don't Lay to Yourself
by Carolynn Carey
If you’ve read the title of this column, no doubt you’re thinking that no one would say, “Don’t lay to yourself” instead of “Don’t lie to yourself.”
And you’d be right. Unfortunately, that is one of the few cases in which we don’t tend to confuse lie and lay.
The truth of the matter is that lie and lay are very confusing and misuse is fairly widespread. For example, the Chicago Manual of Style reports receiving the following question for their Q&A section:
“We recently published a letter from our college president that said, in part, ‘Together, we will work to turn hopes and dreams into reality, and address the challenges that lay before us.’ A reader has pointed out that it should be ‘lie’ instead of ‘lay.’ What do you say?”
The Q&A answer: “Yes, future challenges lie before us. Unless they are chickens.”
And a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich, recently described an incident in which an excellent young copy editor suggested that she might want to change lie to lay in a sentence she’d written that read, in part, “you’d rather lie on the sofa.” Her sentence was correct as written, of course, and her point in the column was that the distinction between lie and lay is being lost to “all but the crotchety few.”
As we all know, the English language is changing and I don’t doubt that at some point in the future, the distinction between lie and lay will be lost. But really, is it so difficult to remember that lay means to place and lie means to recline? You lay your air mattress on the floor and then you lie down on it. After you lay a book on the table, the book just lies there.
As a fiction writer, you may create characters who would say, “I’m gonna lay down on that there air mattress.” Other characters of your creation might declare (nose in the air, of course), “You couldn’t pay me to lie down on that filthy air mattress.”
All of which means, basically, that we need to know the difference so that when we write dialogue, we can gear it toward what our characters would say. In other words, know the rules so you can break them.
Or, as Dwight V. Swain said about breaking rules in Techniques of the Selling Writer, “half the fun of sinning lies in knowing that it’s sinful.”
So go ahead: Sin all you want (in writing ungrammatical dialogue, I mean), but at least know that what you’ve written is “sinful.”
You naughty thing, you!
Copyright © Carolynn Carey.
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