The Chicken Lesson: Lay, Lie, Set, Sit

    My experience with chickens ended the day my Aunt Marilyn asked me if I could cut the head off the one she intended to fry up for Sunday dinner because my mother, who had left me in her care, was coming to visit. I was about nine and visiting from California where I lived in town with my sister, my parents, and our dog.  No chickens.  My aunt, however, had lived on that farm all of her married life, but had left the chicken killing to Uncle Nick who was at work in his machine shop downtown in Aurora, Indiana, so they could support the farm. I told my aunt that, no, I had never killed a chicken and didn’t think today was the day to start. Fortunately, she spied my Uncle Orval in the cornfield across the road and hollered him over. He killed the chicken and taught me what “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” really meant.

    Before that, my chicken experience had been restricted to egg gathering at various relatives’ farms the few summers we spent in the Midwest. Other than the fact that hens don’t always take kindly to small hands taking their eggs, this is what I learned from chickens:
 A hen sits on her nest and lays eggs. The girl sets the eggs carefully into the basket and sits on the back step until her aunt calls her to lay silver on the table. After a chicken dinner, everyone lies down for a nap. 

What’s the deal, you may ask, and why are we easily confused by sit and set, lie and lay?  Sit and lie mean “be seated” and “recline,” respectively. They are intransitive verbs and cannot take objects—therefore it is improper to say, “Sit the book (or your fanny) on the chair” or “Lie the blanket (or your body) on the bed.” Set means “put” and lay means “place.” They are transitive and usually take objects, some thing that is set or laid.

Sit and set confuse us because they sound similar, and because colloquial usage sometimes interchanges them. “Set a spell” is an expression heard in both South and West that though common is incorrect. “Spell” is a time period and not an object.

Lie and lay confuse us the most, primarily because the word lay is also the past tense of lie. Bob Dylan’s “Lay, lady, lay/lay across my big brass bed” fails the test of grammatical correctness, but even I admit it wouldn’t sound right if he twanged, “Lie, lady, lie.”

The conjugations for sit, set, lie, and lay look like this (the underlined words are objects.:

Present Tense            Past Tense                  Past Participle
sit  (I sit on the bed.)        sat (I sat on the bed.)              sat (I have sat on many beds.)

set (I set silver on the table.)    set (I set silver on the table last week.)  set (I have set silver on the table.)

lie (I lie down for a nap.)        lay (I lay in bed yesterday.)          lain (I have lain in bed every day.)   

lay (He lays the paper down.)    laid (He laid the paper down.)          laid (He has laid the paper down.)


Peggy Tabor Millin  Copyright 2008