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Did Chris lie/lay low?

In Huckleberries Thursday (July 20), I wrote that the 26th year of free Handshake Productions concerts was in doubt when cancer, surgery and treatment caused Chris Guggemos to lay low last year. That prompted reader Mary Morris to ask via email whether I'd use lie/lay correctly. In today's Parting Shot, I admitted that I didn't know. That I usually avoid the lie/lay quagmire. I've received 2 or 3 emails explaining how to use lie/low, including this one from EWU English instructor Paul Lindholdt:

"Lay means place. Lie means recline.

If you “lay low,” you must be laying something. That something is understood as yourself. Three hundred years ago, people said in prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Today, we say Chris chose to “lay low.” That is, Chris lay herself low in order to recover.

Make sense? Let me know. I need to tell students without going into subjective-case v. objective-case pronouns.

Distinctions between these two verbs get numbingly more complicated when we move beyond infinitive forms (i.e., “to lay low”) and into conjugated forms. Then, lay is the past tense of lie, etc."

DFO: So, should we pray, "now I lay me down to sleep"? Or "now I lie me down to sleep"? (When in doubt, write around the problem.)



D.F. Oliveria
D.F. (Dave) Oliveria joined The Spokesman-Review in 1984. He currently is a columnist and compiles the Huckleberries Online blog and writes about North Idaho in his Huckleberries column.

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