A.J. Cattapan

Last week I went over the differences between lie and lay with my students. As I warned them, it’s probably the hardest grammar rule out there. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

There are two basic steps:

1) Decide what meaning you want.

• “Lie” means “to rest or recline.”*
• “Lay” means “to put something down.”

2) Decide which form of the verb you need.

• present tense
• present participle (the -ing version)
• past tense
• past participle (used with helping verbs like have, has, and had)

The tricky part is that lie and lay are both irregular verbs, meaning that they don’t take the usually -ed ending for the past and the past participle.

Let’s look at lie (meaning “to rest or recline”) first.

• Present tense examples: Jenny lies in bed whenever she is sick. The pencils lie on the table over there.
• Present participle example: The papers are lying all over the floor.
• Past tense example: Jim lay in bed yesterday because he had the flu. (Not: Jim laid in bed.)
• Past participle example: The twins have lain in bed all week with the chicken pox. (Not: The twins have laid in bed all week.)

Now let’s look at lay (meaning “to put something down”).

• Present tense example: Lay your books on the desk, please.
• Present participle example: He is laying tile at his mother’s house.
• Past tense example: I laid the baby in the crib.
• Past perfect example: She has laid the old newspapers in a bin.

Notice the forms of lay always have an object (animate or inanimate) after them (books, tile, baby, newspapers). There has to be a “something” that is being set down.

On the other hand, if there’s no object and no actually movement, you want a form of lie.

*Lie can also mean “to tell an untruth.” However, we never seem to mess up that verb because it takes the regular -ed ending for past tense. (He lied. She has lied, too.)

photo credit: Lucia Whittaker via photopin cc

During my undergraduate years, I had a fabulous linguistics professor who told us that people often had the same response when they learned what he did for a living: “Oh, you’re an English professor? I guess I better watch my grammar around you.”

His response: “Well, you can watch your grammar if you want, but I have better things to do with my time.”

Surprising? Not to me, even though I’m a grammar geek. As I was telling my students yesterday, we can clarify our ideas when we speak conversationally; thus, we don’t have to worry quite so much about grammar during our conversations. Correct grammar is most essential when we’re writing and don’t have the opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings for our reader.

This brings me to the old “can vs. may” debate that has played out in classrooms for decades. The student asks, “Can I go to the bathroom?” And the teacher responds, “May I go to the bathroom?” Or, if the teacher’s feeling snarky, she says, “I don’t know. Can you?”

Even though I’m an English teacher, I never “correct” my students when they ask if they can go to the bathroom. This may shock some of you, but the word can actually has more than one meaning. Yes, it means to have the ability to do something. However, according to every dictionary I could get my hands on (including Merriam-Webster), the word can also means to “have permission to —used interchangeably with may.”

So why do some people insist that can cannot be used as a synonym for may? Honestly, I don’t know. When my students ask if they can go to the bathroom, I know they’re asking me for permission, and isn’t that the point–that I understand what they are asking?

It’s time to admit that can has more than one meaning, and when it comes to correcting students’ use of the word, as my linguistics professor would say, we’ve got better things to do with our time.

Did you know some verb tenses are “perfect”?

Everyone knows about the three “simple” tenses: present, past, and future. However, we also have three “perfect tenses” in English: present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.

So what makes a tense “perfect”? The perfect tenses have a version of “have” as a helping verb and use the past participle form of the verb, which is usually an -ed ending.

Why as writers should be care about the perfect tenses? They allow us greater accuracy in explaining exactly when the action of the sentence is happening.

Present Perfect Tense:

We use present perfect tense when something happened in the past but still occurs today. For example, I have made the pumpkin pie for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner for the past twenty years.

Notice the verb have made. I made the pumpkin pie in the past, and I’m still making it for this year’s Thanksgiving feast. In fact, I just took this year’s pie out of the oven an hour ago, and here it is:

Nice, huh?

We form present perfect tense by using the helping verb have (or has, if your subject is third person singular like he, she, or it) and the past participle of your verb. (e.g. I have helped Mom; he has helped Mom, too.)

Past Perfect Tenses:

We use past perfect tenses when something happened prior to something else in the sentence. For example, we had polished off the turkey by the time we started on the pie.

Noticed the verbs had polished and started. The verb started is in regular past tense. Had started is past perfect because it indicates that the action of polishing off the turkey happened prior to starting on the pie.

We form the past perfect by using the helping verb had with past participle.

Future Perfect Tenses:

We used the future perfect tense when we want to indicate that some action will have finished by the time we get to the next one. For example, I will have stuffed the turkey by noon tomorrow.

Notice the verb will have stuffed. It’s telling us that the action of stuffing the turkey will be finished by noon tomorrow. Noon has not arrived yet. In fact, tomorrow has not arrived yet! But by the time it does, the action of stuffing the turkey will already be complete.

We form the future perfect tenses by using the helping verbs will and have before the past participle.

turkey photo credit: Calgary Reviews via photopin

Questions about verb tenses? Got your own Thanksgiving example to share?

Compliments on my pumpkin pie? I’m an expert, you know. 🙂