From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter.

And I would like to do this show with the springboard of something that listeners sometimes

have tweeted me about. And it is the difference between lie and lay, which I openly admit

I really do not observe in my colloquial speech. And so it feels perfectly normal for me to

talk about, I'm laying on the floor and I see a spider on the ceiling that works fine for me.

I can talk about how you might want to lie that spoon down and go take a look at what's going on

out. The one that that all feels perfectly right to me. I intellectually know that the idea is

supposed to be that you just lie there, but you lay something down. But you know, I never really

picked it up from people around me, including the educated ones. And it always seemed that

meaning was clear. I just learned later that there's this blackboard rule that you supposed to

observe. And I know that I'm not alone. The truth is, it's a funny little part of the grammar.

There's another pair like that where we have less trouble because the two actions referred to

are so much more graphically different, rising and raising. So a bubble rises all by itself.

But then you raise something up with your hand. We don't have trouble with that. Notice lie,

lay, rise, raise. But then if you think about it, there's another one sit and set. So technically,

technically, it's supposed to be that you're sitting in a chair, but you set the vase down on the

table. Go set that on the table. Now, now you might say that, but you might not go set the

vase on the table. Nobody gets smacked on the back of the head for saying that what is this,

this business of these pairs of verbs where we learn at a certain point that we often use them

wrong and we feel a little self-conscious. Well, it used to be that you didn't have to ask because

it was part of a larger pattern that you couldn't miss. So there wasn't only just lie and lay and

people yelling at you about it. There was lie and lay and rise and raise and sit and set and fall

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