I got a vibrating plate. It’s like the 2025 version of the vibrating exercise belt that Sissy Spacek’s character in Blast from the Past used while drinking martini’s and losing her mind in a fall out shelter. (Great scene, but not great enough to be found on the internet apparently)

I had previously used the plate to help with a neck injury. This morning, I ended up injuring an uninjured neck. Ugh.

I texted my mum. “Mom. I was thinking today how great my neck feels. Then I laid on the vibrating plate… and hurt my neck!! What the heck!!” (I like to rhyme and also to tell my mum everything) “When my neck was hurting, laying on the vibrating plate helped. Today, I must’ve been laying on it wrong.”

The grammar wizards of the text message world underlined ‘laying’ in a blue swiggly line and suggested I change it to ‘lying’. I asked my mum how to know which word to use, Lay or Lie. She didn’t know. So I decided to ask Google.

First… I typed the sentence onto a Word document. Apparently Word finds either word acceptable in this sentence. Interesting. (WordPress found either sentence fine as well, but the site also let me use the wrong ‘There/their/they’re’… so we’re DEFINITELY not trusting WordPress here)

My question ended up morphing into, ‘Where did LIE LIKE A DOG come from‘? Which took me down a rabbit hole in 1500’s grammar and play on words, completely unrelated to my original quest, but quite interesting.

Getting back on track… this is what I learned:

This took me a hot minute to figure out as my body was placed flat on the plate and it was flat on the plate. The key is the ‘object’.

Example: She lays the book on the table. This sentence has the book (object)… making the verb transitive.

Example: She lies on the blanket. This sentence does not have a direct object, making the verb intransitive.

So… in the text to my mum… the vibrating plate was the direct object, so I needed to use the intransitive verb, lie.

Here’s an extremely helpful tidbit from typesetcontent.com:

So again… going back to my example, it would not have made sense if I had said, ‘I think I must’ve been putting on it wrong.’ BUT… the first part of my text, ‘I laid on the vibrating plate’ is correct and ‘put’ wouldn’t work there. There’s no direct object though, so lay it is!! Sheesh. English.

I feel 75% confident I’ll get this right going forward. Maybe 65%.

Researching Lie and Lay was not on my to-do list today. This is why I struggle to get things done.

Another helpful article from Brittanica.com

And lastly, while I was looking for a picture of Sissy Spacek using the vibrating belt, I found this very interesting article about terrifying exercise machines on the past. Won’t help you figure out which Lie/Lay to use, but entertaining nevertheless!