At the risk of weakening my case, I will note here that these are in the second person imperative. Grammarist says that the difference between lie and lay is that lay needs an object - you lay something (I titter a little here and perhaps snigger), and you lie yourself. That is lie is instransitive, while lay is necessarily a transitive verb.
But this is one of those modern distinctions created by Grammarians. While I am a good boy and obey the rules, we should know that historically and colloquially, there is no such clear distinction between lie and lay and they are merely variants.
Let's look at Psalm 4, verse 8, in the King James Bible where it says -
I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.
Technically you could argue that here (and with the Auden quote above) there is an object - namely "me" (or in Auden "your sleeping head".) But to the ordinary Joe and Jane it sounds pretty much like I am "laying down" - "I lay down".
In Anglo-Saxon, lie was licgan which Bosworth-Toller list as meaning "to be in a prostrate or recumbent position" [not prostate - careful! Reminds me of St Pancreas that too)] while lay was lecgan "to cause to take a horizontal position". I think this is exactly what Slowhand had in mind for Sally.
If you're like me you are already seeing that these two verbs weren't orginally two verbs at all, but one! And it's to do with umlaut. It always is with Anglo Saxon. But when I look I see that as well as Anglo-Saxon licgan and lecgan, we have Gothic ligan and lagyan and German liegen and legen (I note with interest that the word law is also from this root *lagu - that which is layed down). Unhelpfully for me, it seems the Germanic languages are preserving the difference between lie and lay. The online Etymological dictionary gives me some succour in that it notes that the root of both these words is the Primitive Indo-European *leghe- meaning both lie and lay. So before the pesky primitive Germanics differentiated them, they were the same word. And that differentiation was probably the decision some old Germanic pedant in a marsh somewhere in Friesland, or Gotland. Not Kent, certainly, it was before they got to Kent.
I am helped also by Peter Trudgill in his Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language, p 51 (Cambridge University Press) where he discusses lie versus lay. He says that the umlaut change (though he does not dare mention umlaut) between lie and lay to create a difference between doing something yourself and causing something else to do that action was preserved in other pairs such as Middle English sink versus sench "cause to sink". Don't worry about the palatalisation of the -k, just take my word for it it's the same word. He also mentions his Norfolk dialect distinction between sit and set - where people will ask you to "set down..." But Trudgill says "the distinction between lie and lay is being lost in most forms of English" Yes! Hooray!
This rant was caused by a person reviewing my ebook The Haunting. (Yes I know I just plugged that) and saying I was illiterate because my main guy talks about someone laying on the bed. In his first person vernacular speech. Most of us don't talk like Government reports lady! Not when we're about to be eaten by monsters!!! Sheesh. Now, I know this might reflect on me badly, going to such length to defend this. And I don't even mind criticism.
A's gaan for a lig doon, noo. (as we would say)
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