General Discussion : Do I lie my head down or lay my head down? (for grammar geeks)

lay my head down. yesterday, i laid my head down.

this is one of those cases where brain-logic and reading flow are gong to win out whatever the actual gramatical rule here is. sometimes you have to do that.

because "I burst my elbow on the doorframe" is never going to be RIGHT. even if it's technically CORRECT. 

i don't know if you'll find one for this reason, is the thing, i mean. like when rules break rules even n the rule books simply because they sound and look wrong so an exception must be made.

maybe YOU are making the rule/exception to the rule right now.

I usually go to Grammar Girl for these questions.

okay, so it sounds okay if you're using lay with head in past tense, but lie with head in present still sounds way off. 

Pretty sure it's "I lay my head on the pillow" like "I lay my notebook on the table." This is sort of ugly because it reads like there's a disembodied head, like said above, but by confining it to a singular body part you're treating it as an object, I believe.

I usually just try to find less invasive sentences that skim over this body orientation information and get to the more interesting stuff faster. It's hard, and if I can't figure out a way to show where a person's body is like that then I'll just detail it more or make it weird, so the person reading might take a pause and physically try to stick their own head behind their armpit or something. I feel okay with taking a reader out of the story if it's something kinda fun, and it's better than taking them out of it by using boring, shitty descriptions, at least if they're like me.

So, basically, Renfield, you agree that saying "I lay my head down" instead of "I lie my head down" makes it sound like the head is cut off or a separate object, but this is ok with you because using the transitive verb makes the "singular body part" into a direct object.

 

Yes, also from everything I've heard it's technically correct.

(In these examples, 'your head' is the direct object.  Remember, lie cannot have a direct object.)

 

Who lay or laid something down? I did. What was lay or laid down? My head, which is connected physically to the person who did the lying or laying (one hopes). The correct verb is "lay."

In the original example of, "Yesterday, I lay my head down," according to those links it would correctly be, "Yesterday, I laid my head down." You, your metaphysical sense of being, which is the subject, did the act of laying, while your physical body is the object being laid down.

Ah yes, you're right about that link, I read it wrong. I'm sorry. I totally disagree with that one, then. Every other place I see says different after some googling. Here's another:

You almost never mean: I need to lay down You almost always mean: I need to lie down Why: This is another case where people think (wrongly) that a particular word sounds more “educated.” Lay and lie are not interchangeable. Lie doesn’t require an object: “I need to lie down.” But lay does: “I need to lay my head down.” Confusion kicks in because of the past tense of both verbs—lie becomes lay; lay becomes laid—but the usage stays the same.

and here's an article using "my head" as a direct object example

"Dinsdale, he was a nice boy. He nailed my head to a coffee table." [Their italics]

Maybe think of it more as if your head was the subject of the sentence, then it'd be "Yesterday, my head lay down."

I like Howie's way of doing things. Whenever something confuses me and I don't know the proper way to use it, I find an alternative. 

I'm a grammar geek, too. But I made the decision a long time ago to not concern myself with grammar while writing; rather, I like to write the way people talk. Minus the ums, uhs, and awkward pauses, of course. 

I'm of the mindset that you must know the rules before you break them, so you know when and where to do so for the best effect. "The box in which I keep my love letters" has a different feel than "The box I keep my love letters in." 

When it comes to puzzles like the one you've come across, however... I choose to avoid the issue completely.

Please no sticky.

But I still don't think we've arrived at a definitive answer on this discussion thread.             

 

That answer may never come, Pushpaw. I'm still living my life in fear that someone will ask me what shape a tire is. Not because the question itself is frightening, but because I honestly don't know! Sure, there were a few times I thought I knew. I even said "yes, that's it!". But then someone else would come along and offer another equally valid arguement. To this day, the mere mention of the word "tire" makes me want to lay/lie my head on some railroad tracks and wait for a train (with wheels) to come along.

 

(I've had a lot of coffee this morning.)

Exactly!

@Pushpaw -- Hmmm... I've never heard of an english grammar rule before that said, "transitive verbs take direct objects except when those direct objects are body parts." Body parts can be direct objects too.

Look at common phrases we use every day:

"I had my back against the wall."

"I broke my neck getting the groceries in the car"

"We busted a gut laughing"

"The sight of that hairless cat really curddled my blood."

'flexing my muscles'

'shooting his mouth off'

We use body parts as direct objects all the time... why shouldn't we?

And to bring lay/lie back into this, don't forget the very old fashioned children's prayer:

"Now I lay me down to sleep..." Where the entire subject is taken as the direct object. The subject can also be the object, that's the beauty of having both a subjective and objective case for personal pronouns. If we couldn't have them both, we would never have needed to make a distinction between the two.

And these conceptual inferences are more than 'old-fashioned' but timeless: the snake eating its tail, Zeus birthing Athena from his own head...

While this has been somewhat interesting, I can't find any evidence to back up your premise. I've been looking all morning for another reference to that rule and have only found the negative in an MIT linguistics course exam:

3. Body-Part Objects
In English descriptions of the natural movements of body parts use a transitive verb, as in She raised a hand or She tossed her head, taking the body part as object. In some languages, however, the body parts are expressed as obliques in such descriptions. In Russian, for instance, they are expressed as instrumental NPs, as in (7). This possibility suggests that these (uses of) verbs should be distinguished from prototypical agent-patient verbs. Is there semantic and/or syntactic evidence from English or another language you know for not treating these verbs as prototypical transitive verbs?

(7) Moved body parts are objects in English, but instrumental NPs in Russian: vskinut’ golovoj ‘toss head-INST’, dvigat’ kryl’jami ‘move wings-INST’, ˇsevelit’ pal’- cami ‘move fingers-INST’

Now, your stipulation here seems to be asserting that there is indeed a difference in the use of body parts as objects in English, and while there is a weird sort of reasoning behind it that I can kind of grasp, simply putting your foot down and saying that "if it's part of the subject, it can't be a direct object" is just you running your mouth off. I've given many, even idiomatic cases, that we use our own body parts as objects in our transitive verb constructions. (There's evidence to suggest that our whole conception of consciousness (indeed perhaps conscioussness itself) was born from a place of not understanding the connectedness of things we take for granted today... including body parts at a conceptual level if you want to extrapolate, but to be precise Julien Jaynes' work was primarily about conceptual constructions and not physical ones... but I digress.)

Now, that's not to say that there aren't remnants of other borrowed languages that do indeed make these sort of distinctions... and English is excellent at appropriating other languages. But it seems to me that in usage, "my head" can be a separate grammatical object from the rest of my body, even if "I" is the implied subject, otherwise "I" would never be able to stick "my head" up "my own ass..."

There ain't no reason to not keep going on this.

Well that depends, do you wish to tell not tell the truth or go to sleep?