Did you lie down – or lay down?

Spell check is great – but it’s not helping some of us in the grammatical error department...

Lay and lie is often considered the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. Please lay the pencil on the table. If you already did that, you laid the pencil on the table. You may want to go lie down – but if you did that yesterday, it gets grammatically tricky. The past tense to lie is lay – unless you’re referring to an untruth - which would be lied.

If you consider this a moot point – it isn’t. Contrary to common misuse, “moot” doesn’t imply something is obsolete. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion.