Laid, laying.

But I think the answer to your last question is yes.

I was joking, nightowl - think it's time I said goodnight!

I know!! Should have put in a

You can lay the law down! I do.

"Lay, lady lay, lay across my big brass bed,
Stay, lady, stay while the night is still ahead"

really wouldn't sound the same as

"Lie, lady, lie, lie across my big brass bed,
Why, lady, why go while the night is still ahead?"

And what about "Lay down Sally and rest you in my arms"?

Jaineainsworth Your post is a model of clarity to which I have nothing to add.

I love 'Annie's Song' but when John Denver sings 'Let me lay down beside you' I have to cringe.
My personal bete noir remains journalists who cannot use English properly.
One common mistake is to use past tenses wrongly, e.g. the boat sunk - and what about 'Honey, I shrunk the kids'? Argh.................

Lay, lie annoys me too ( thanks, jane for an excellent explanation ) but I think it's a lost cause. What annoys me more is 'may/might' because it actually leads to misunderstandings eg 'He may not have died' (but you've got a corpse there!) Could you have ago at this, jane?

That one drives me mad too, Lilygran, but at the moment I can't find the energy to write a full explanation. In any case, the posters in this thread probably don't need one!

So where does 'laid' come into it.

I lie down. I laid down.

Vq 'lie' as in lie down is an intransitive verb (ie no object) and the past tense is 'lay' as in lay down.
'Lay' in the present tense is a transitive verb ie requiring an object, and the past tense is 'laid '.
So your sentence 'I laid down' would only be correct if you laid something down, eg I laid down my heavy load.
Lily I'm going out now and will have to think about may and might!

I lie down today. I lay down yesterday. I will lie down tomorrow.
Today I will lay the foundation tone. Last year I laid a foundation stone.
Think of 'trans' as being 'carrying over' - a transitive verb carries over an action from the subject to the object.

I wonder if our age is an indication of when formal grammar was taught in schools. I can remember having to parse and analyse a sentence.
Parsing a word meant stating which part of speech it was (noun, adjective, verb, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, exclamation).
If it is was a verb, we had to state the number ( ie. I is first person), singular or plural, tense, voice (active or passive), transitive or intransitive, mood. I may have forgotten something in the past 55 years!
We used to tie our poor Latin teacher in knots, asking how to say 'I will be about to have done it'. There was something called the pluperfect tense. French has some interesting tenses , like the past imperfect, but I tend to live only in the present and simple past and future! I can do subjunctive though.
Analysing a sentence meant dividing it into clauses and then stating the type and function of each clause. I don't know whether it made us any more analytic in our general thinking, but I enjoyed it.

May or might?

May and might are both ways of expressing possibility. Is there a difference between the way in which they should be used?



Some people insist that you should use may (present tense) when talking about a current situation and might (past tense) when talking about an event that happened in the past. For example:



I may go home early if I’m tired. (present tense)

He might have visited Italy before settling in Nuremberg. (past tense)



In practice, this distinction is rarely made today and the two words are generally interchangeable:



I might go home early if I’m tired.

He may have visited Italy before settling in Nuremberg.



But there is a distinction between may have and might have in certain contexts. If the truth of a situation is still not known at the time of speaking or writing, either of the two is acceptable:



By the time you read this, he may have made his decision.

I think that comment might have offended some people.



If the event or situation referred to did not in fact occur, it's better to use might have:



The draw against Italy might have been a turning point, but it didn't turn out like that.

(Cut and pasted from the net - I hope that clears it up! )

Whilst idly browsing last night I found this website. It's a Spanish BBC site with questions about the English Language.

www.bbc.co.uk/spanish/specials/1125_questions/index.shtml

If only I could speak Spanish..............

Just look at the column on the left hand side of the page Greatnan there are links to some confusing English words and the text is all in English

absent surely your quotes are really good examples of poetic licence, or should that be license

Stood and standing - another one!!

Just popular usage, I reckon kittylester. Both songs I rather like, so I'm not complaining and poetic licence is a good excuse.

May is also confused with can.
As in, 'Can I go into town?'
'Well, yes you can because its not far and you can walk'

Or, 'may I go into town?'
No you may not, because it's thick fog out there and I want you to stay home.

Perhaps I could have given better examples but you get the drift, I think!

"Can I get down from the table"

or

"May I get down from the table"

One is asking permission the other is asking if you are able to get down from the table.

My very annoying grandfather-in-law used to reply 'You can, but you may not.'

[slap around the head with a mouldy kipper emoticon]

But what about 'Can you lay the table for me?'

I nearly fell for that one Kitty, very good

My goodness! There are lot of erudite posters on Gransnet tonight. I really cannot compete with you lot.
I had better go to bed before I make a grammatical error that with keep you all awake all night worrying about its awfulness.

Night all.

Same here Nellie!

wow...and this matters, why?