" Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: “To lay is to get laid and laid.” (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Monica police officer might read into it.) “To lie,” then, works as follows. “Today I lie on the beach.” “Yesterday I lay on the beach.” “At times, I have lain on the beach.” None of those acts puts me in any danger of being arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior. But that’s only because I conjugated the verb correctly. I "