Lie, Lay, Laid, and Lain

Every day I see many instances of poor grammar, words being misused, punctuation used improperly, and more. Does it bother me? Not really.

But the problem is there’s no need for it.

Unless you’re in a profession where grammar is important, people soon forget the grammatical explanations they learned when they were in school, so instead, they revert to what they think sounds right or what they hear others saying.

Some of the bigger issues are some of the easiest to resolve—if they’re explained properly. The problem is they are seldom explained properly. People who try to explain grammar typically resort to using grammatical terms that few people understand.

During the normal course of browsing my Facebook feed yesterday, I encountered seventeen instances where “lie, lay, laid or laying” were used wrong and many of these were on writer’s posts.

Was I appalled? No. But it did leave me wondering why someone who writes for a living (or even a hobby) would get this wrong consistently, especially when it’s so easy to learn.

I did a series of books (twenty-six of them), and each one tackles two or three grammar problems. I tried to explain the issues people faced with each word (or words) and provided an easy way to resolve them.

I dug deep to discover ways to explain the issues without using grammatical terms. You don’t have to know the rules of grammar to understand any of these. Let’s take what seems to be one of the worse offenders of misuse—lie, lay, laid.

I broke it down to either a substitution or the use of three simple rules, neither of which require grammatical terms to explain. Below are the rules.

🐗 The first rule is simple. Never use “laid” or “laying” to mean rest or sleep. If you remember that, all you need to work on are the words “lie” and “lay.”

🐗 If you have a temptation to use the word “laid” associated with rest or sleep, use “lay” instead.

🐗 And if you are tempted to use “laying” associated with rest, use “lying.”

Examples:

❌ You wouldn’t say “I was laying down when you called.”

✅ You’d say “I was lying down when you called.”

❌ You wouldn’t say “I was tired after working out, so I laid down to rest.”

✅ You’d say “I was tired after working out, so I lay down to rest.”

❌ You wouldn’t say “The dog is laying down.”

✅ You’d say “The dog is lying down.”

❌ You wouldn’t say “I’m going to lay down.”

✅ You’d say “I’m going to lie down.”

For those of you who don’t like rules, there is also a simple substitution method explained that works great.

For all of you who have ever wondered if you’re using the right word or if you’re using a word the right way, do yourself a favor and pick up one of the Grammar Bites books. They’re about 25 to 40 pages long, and they’re only 99c each.

Best of all, they’re guaranteed not to be confusing.

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Giacomo Giammatteo is the author of gritty crime dramas about murder, mystery, and family. And he also writes nonfiction books including the No Mistakes Careers series as well as books about grammar, publishing., and children’s fiction and nonfiction.

When Giacomo isn’t writing, he’s helping his wife take care of the animals on their sanctuary. At last count, they had forty animals—seven dogs, one horse, six cats, and twenty-five pigs.

Oh, and one crazy—and very large—wild boar, who used to take walks with Giacomo every day.

He lives in Texas where he and his wife have an animal sanctuary with forty loving “friends.”    

Tags: grammar, writing