Lie lady lie

Lie across my big brass bed.
This is how the song SHOULD go if it were grammatically correct. Alternatively, it could be "Lay yourself lady lay yourself, lay yourself across my big brass bed", although that certainly ruins the meter, doesn't it?

This topic arose out of a conversation I had today with my fella, A___. I wanted to pick a music bed for a public service announcement that I'm planning on doing for the radio station. The music needs to be something suggestive and somewhat schmaltzy. After a moment of thinking, I said "Hey how about that 'lay across my big brass bed' song?"
A___ said "What?"
I sang him a few lines. And sang the bendy guitar part too. While this was very amusing, it did not provoke recall. So then it was on to itunes, where we discovered that many many people have covered this song. Among the artists covering the Dylan ditty were Ministry, Duran Duran, and Isaac Hayes. We were in the middle of playing samples of various versions when my good friend R___ (cjblue) called me to say hi and to wish me better moods. I answered laughing and explained what was going on (then I played the clip from Duran Duran's version which just made me laugh harder).

R___ reminded me that in fact this song is grammatically incorrect. "It should be 'Lie lady lie' because 'lay' is the wrong verb," she explained, adding "You're the one who told me that!"

I was a bit horrified to think that I might have been seen as that annoying person who goes around pretentiously lecturing friends on verb usage, but I know myself well enough to realize I probably I wasn't a total tit about it. I'm not a language nazi. And I guess it has served her well because she said she has always remembered since which word to use when.

In case you're interested in correct English usage (as trivia or self edification), you can use the Dylan song to remember when to use lay and when to use lie.

If you're speaking in the present tense, lay is a transitive verb - it takes an object. You lay something (like a book) on a table, on a shelf, or on a bed (big and brass or not). You can lay yourself someplace, as in "now I lay me down to sleep". There's the slang version of lay which is transitive as well, but which isn't so casually confusable with the use of lie since you can lay someone standing, sitting, or reclining.

Lie is intransitive - it doesn't take an object. It is what you do when you recline, as in when you lie on the beach, on a big brass bed, or perhaps in a nest of pillows on the shag floor in the back of a van. Here's where the confusion comes in - lay is also (unfortuately) the past tense form of the intransitive verb lie, as in "Last night, as I lay in his big brass bed, I had strange dreams about the members of Duran Duran dressed as hippies trying to coax me into a van with a shag interior." I'm sure there is a good etymological reason for lay serving double duty as a verb in its own right and as the bastard past tense form of lie, but it's best to just think of the unfortunate past tense of lie as an accident, like George Bush being president of the US or the sound similarity between the words "sum" and "some".

So when you hear "lay across my big brass bed" remember that someone is, grammatically speaking, asking that woman to do more than simply recline.