However, you show yourself to be a more literate person when you use them correctly. Lay and lie are tricky words to navigate. He planned to attend the event, but he was laid low by Covid. The disgraced CEO lay low for a year after his release from prison then he wrote a best-selling memoir. Oh, the English language!Īfter the robbery, the thief lay low for several weeks. Unfortunately, the same past-tense issues that plagued us with lay and lie pursue us into these phrases. I told him that this love affair would lay him low. The tornado may lay low large parts of the state. It implies felling someone with a blow or knocking them down. So, the phrase lay low might well be rewritten as lay low. In other words, we don’t just lay low we lay something low. Lay low requires a direct object of the word lay. They plan to lie low until after the holidays. Lie low means to hide or conceal oneself. Now that we’ve sorted out lie and lay, we can move on to the phrases that contain them. This sentence follows the same pattern as the first one, with the present tense of lay in the first half and the past tense in the second. He told me to lay it down, and I laid it down. In this sentence, lie is in the present tense in the first half of the sentence (He told me to lie down) and in the past tense in the second half of the sentence (I lay down). Don’t you love the English language? Lie-Lay It is also the past tense of lie! What’s the past tense of lay, you ask? That would be laid.
So why do we get so confused? As it turns out, lay has another meaning as well. She lays out her clothes for the next morning every night before she lies down to sleep. Using both in the same sentence, we have: Lay must be followed by an object, such as in “lay the book down” or “chickens lay eggs.” LAY (verb) means to put or place something on a surface. He is lying down now, so I won’t bother him. Lie (verb or noun) also means an untruth or a false statement.Īfter I exercise, I like to lie on the couch for a few minutes. You lie on the bed, lie down, or you are lying down. LIE (verb or noun) means to recline or rest on a surface. In my book on business writing, Get to the Point!, I list many commonly misused words, including these two biggies. The problem arises from a deeper confusion about the difference between lie and lay. Many of us are perplexed about the difference between lying low and laying low. Alarm bells went off in my head as I wondered, “Doesn’t she mean she is lying low?” A friend recently told me that she was laying low until after New Year’s.
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