Lie/Lay

 Although it seems like the battle has been well and truly lost on this front, it still bothers me that people use 'lay' instead of 'lie'. For instance:

"There's a bunch of keys laying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?"

This should be:

"There's a bunch of keys lying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?"

'Lay' is a transitive verb. That is, it's something you do to something. In the case of 'lay', you might lay an egg or a table (though you wouldn't lay a table in the same way you laid an egg).

'Lie' is an intransitive verb. It's something you do without there being an object of the action. For instance, when you run, you don't need to say "I ran myself" in order to have an object for the verb; you just say, "I ran." So, with 'lie', we have, for instance, "I was tired and decided to lie down." Or: "You've made your bed, now lie on it." Etc.

Whenever someone uses 'lay' instead of 'lie', I have (sometimes quite contorted and bizarre) visions of parturition. 

It's easy to see why the two have become so mixed up. The simple past form of the verb 'lie' (when it means put oneself in a horizontal position) is 'lay', which is, of course, the simple present form of 'lay'. Maybe there is also some unconscious wish to avoid 'lie' because it's a homonym for the word meaning 'to speak falsely'.

Tangentially, I was irritated throughout Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations of Dostoevsky to find that 'prostrate' was treated as an intransitive rather than a transitive verb. One doesn't simply prostrate; one prostrates oneself.


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