lay off!

This one drives me nuts.

I had this English professor in college for freshman composition who loved to drill us on several common grammatical errors. The guy was a bit if a character, a veteran of the Citadel who never gave up the haircut, now teaching at an ostensibly Baptist college in upstate South Carolina. (Looking back, I realize he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Marine instructor in Full Metal Jacket...). Anyway, one of the things he hounded us about was the difference between lie, which is an intransitive verb (I want to lie down), and lay, which is transitive (i.e., it has an object, as in “I will lay something down”). The confusion comes because lay is the past tense of lie: Now I lie down, yesterday I lay down. Now I lay something down, yesterday I laid something down.

Yes, it’s confusing. But once you get it straight, it drives you crazy to here someone else get it wrong. And it happens all the time.

So there’s this new song on the radio and MTV that my wife likes, by this band Snow Patrol. The lyrics in the chorus go “If I just lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me, and…” something or other. I honestly don’t know what comes next, because my brain is convulsing at the grammatical injustice...I mean, it’s just wrong on so many levels. First, he obviously means “if I just lie here,” which is the common mistake. That one I can almost forgive, if only because so many people do it. But then, he goes and says “would you lie with me.” What?!! Why should it change!? I lie, you lie, he lies. Or I lay something, you lay something, he lays something. You laid an egg, buddy! It’s one thing to screw it up, but at least be consistent!

I don’t mean to be a grammar weenie. I find there to be something roguishly charming about George Thorogood singing “Who do you love?” when in fact he means whom. And the sad thing is that some of my favorite bands are guilty of the same mistake: Dream Theater (in Learning to Live: “and I lay here drained of strength”), Maynard James Keenen of A Perfect Circle (in the otherwise spectacular Rose: "So no longer will I lay down, play dead"), and even Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, who should know better (in One of the Few: “make ‘em lay down and die.” Oddly, he got it right in The Fletcher Memorial Home later on the same album.) I mean, how does this stuff get through? I guess there’s probably really no editing process, which strikes me as kind of odd. I mean, they wouldn’t just let the bass player lay down a track without the producer, the recording engineer, and the mastering engineer all having a chance to fix it up audio-wise; for that matter, they certainly wouldn't keep a track with a blatantly wrong note in it. So, why don’t they have someone do a read-through of the lyrics before they commit them to tape and print? One would like think that maybe when they’re preparing to stamp out a hundred thousand copies of a CD they’d at least let Word do a grammar check.