ok, i get it

[rone]

mskala and eejitalmuppet had brought up my misuse of "lied down", although in an insufficiently explanatory way, so i turned them away.  merde pointed out that "lay" is the past tense of "lie" (meaning to recline, not to dissemble).

Anyway, English sucks, and i suck.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I didn't explain beyond suggesting the replacement "lay" because I honestly thought it was a simple typo. It didn't occur to me that you might not know it was wrong. I figured when you declined to change it that maybe your character was supposed to be thinking in some kind of weird dialect or something.

English, sucking, and other uses of "lay"

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

Tenuously apropos of which, I remember an incident from my student days, when a friend introduced his German girlfriend to his parents. His very straight-laced, big-in-the-church, no-sex-out-of-wedlock-or-you-burn-in-Hell parents.

"Ja, Davie is teaching me English: 'I lay Davie, Davie lays me...' Also, "fuck" is quite a rude word, ja?"

[opadit.livejournal.com]

It's all an issue of transitive versus intransitive.

[tritone.livejournal.com]

I blame the nursery rhyme "Now I lay me down to sleep". It would be easier to remember that "lay" is the past tense of "lie" if "lay [object]" weren't a present tense transitive verb as well.