He lay on the bed

[pne]

Urk.

"He lay on the bed" sounds really weird to me; my internal grammar seems to have been invaded by hearing people use "lay" intransitively as well as transitively, and it no longer recognises "lay" as the simple past of "lie".

"He is lying on the bed" sounds fine, as do "In the afternoons, he likes to lie on the bed" and "After having lain on the bed for hours"; it's just the simple past that sounds odd to me, I think.

(But "He laid on the bed all afternoon" sounds wrong to me, too. So I essentially have no acceptable form for the simple past. I think I feel like people who forgot most of their first language but haven't fully acquired their second language so they're in a kind of incomplete limbo state wrt language.)

Comments

[psitticism.livejournal.com]

My solution to this is to simply stay in bed. Then I never have to worry about the past tense.

[eva]

I am still struggling with the correct spelling of the various tenses for "lieing" and "lying". I keep forgetting and having to look these up...

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I feel that too sometimes. I just have to remind myself lie lay lain, lay lay laid?

Same with "different than" - I thought prescriptively it's "different from" but most people say "different than". I end up not liking either one and usually try to avoid that construction at all.