A Word, Please: A sunbather shares her expert opinion on ‘laying out’

When I was young and immortal, I used to sunbathe a lot. A lot. It was part of the Florida culture I grew up in, where flocks of shortsighted people with northern European pigmentation would descend on Clearwater Beach and broil our pale skin to a bright red amid the strains of Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” wafting from the nearby hotels.

We had a term for this activity. The verb was “to lay out.” Not lie out, lay out. As in, “Wow, you’re beet red. Have you been laying out all day?” “Yes, and I plan to lay out tomorrow, too.”

Years later, when I discovered things like being indoors and reading, I learned about the verbs “lay” and “lie.” And when I tried to find out whether one lays out in the sun or lies out in the sun, I learned something else: Lexicographers, the professionals who write dictionaries based on how people use language, come from a very different world than I do. I know this because, for all their definitions of “lay,” “lie,” “layout” and “lay out,” none refers to sunbathing.

In lexicographer land, the verb “to lay out” has several meanings, including to plan in detail or design something, for which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives this example: “The transatlantic balloonists laid out a backup plan in case of an emergency.” (Crossing an ocean in a balloon? Sure, that’s a thing. But exposing bare skin to the sun? That’s just crazy.)

Merriam’s also defines “lay out” as spending money, preparing a corpse for viewing, knocking someone unconscious, arranging something, or marking something to work on it, as with a drilling machine.

The noun “layout” follows the pattern of a lot of verb-noun relationships in English. Unlike the verb form, it’s one word, similar to how the verbs “check up” and “make up” have as their noun forms “checkup” and “makeup.” The meaning of “layout” is a little different, too. It’s usually a design, like the layout of a magazine or community or building.

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If you understand the difference between “lay” and “lie,” you might logically conclude that to sunbathe is to lie out, not lay out. “To lie” is an intransitive verb that means to recline (it also means to say something untrue, but that’s a different word than the one we’re talking about). When you lie, you do so yourself. That’s different from “lay,” which is a transitive verb and therefore takes an object. You lay the book on the table. The book is the object of the transitive verb. So you yourself lie. But you lay something else on a surface.

The past tense forms of “lay” and “lie” get confusing. That’s because the simple past tense of “lie” just happens to be “lay.” So today you lie on the couch, but yesterday you lay on the couch. The past participle, the one that goes with a form of “have,” is “lain”: In the past you have lain on the couch.

The past forms of “lay” are easier. Both the simple past tense and the past participle are “laid”: Today I lay the book on the table, yesterday I laid the book on the table, in the past I have laid the book on the table.

When you’re sunbathing, you’re not talking about laying some object on the sand. You’re talking about lying on the sand. So it would make sense that you would say “lie out” to mean sunbathe. But I think that would be wrong. Idiom — common usage — is a crucial element of correctness in English. So even if “to lie out” is truer to the definitions of “lie” and “lay,” “to lay out” is how people in my scorched, shriveled, leathery world describe sunbathing. And, unlike those lexicographers who sit indoors reading books all day, we’re the experts.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.