”Now I lay me down to sleep…”
”Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.”
Are those grammatically incorrect? Asking for a nerd like me.
Neither is grammatically incorrect.
I forget the terms... I think one is a transitive verb and the other is intransitive. And I forget which is which. Maybe "lay" is transitive, meaning you perform the action on an object. "Lie", would therefore be intransitive, meaning you just do it.
So, you lie in bed at night.
You lay the pencil on the table.
The really confusing part is that "lay" is also the past tense of "lie". So, last night, you lay in bed. And last night, you laid the pencil on the table.
"Now I lay me down to sleep..."
"I" is the subject, and "me" is the object. So that's weird.
"Randy lay there like a slug."
That's the past tense of lie.
Honestly, I don't mind when normal people talking in normal, everyday talk get it wrong. I'm sure there's a bazillion things I say incorrectly.
This dude is a school superintendent, writing a statement. He should know well enough to get this right, and he has the time to get it right.
