Lie

Sometimes it’s the simple words that create complex meanings.  We all know what the verb “lie” means, in either of its two main senses: “to be in a prostrate position,” “to tell an untruth.”  The first sense has been stable for hundreds if not thousands of years.  The Old English licgan and the Old Germanic ligan (the ancestor of the modern German verb liegen) both mean “be prostrate.”  From this, dozens of compound or figurative uses have developed: “lie with” as a euphemism for “have sex with,” “lie heavy upon,” “lie in ruins,” and so on.  A horse in a race may “lie” in second place; a ship may “lie” at anchor; in a now obsolete usage, a traveler may “lie”—that is, temporarily reside—in a foreign city.  It “lies” in my power to tell you these things because I’ve read the OED entry.   Words cognate to “lie” in ancient languages name the thing on which people usually lie down: Latin lectus and Greek lekhos both mean “bed.”  The telling-a-fib sense of “lie” is just as old, the verb descending from Old Germanic forms like liogan (the modern German is lügen) to the Old English leogan.  Somewhere along the way licgan and leogan lost their medial consonants and, in the haphazard fashion which has always characterized the development of the English language, they coalesced into the homophonic “lie.”

So where’s the complexity?  In statements which employ both senses simultaneously, in other words, punningly.  Two examples.  In the seventeenth-century Sir Henry Wotton was an important English courtier and diplomat,

the intimate friend of the poet John Donne.  Wotton seems a Renaissance version of Robert van Gulik (see richard and socle), being an ambassador (to Venice, among other places), a connoisseur (of architecture), an author (of poetry), and a remarkable linguist (besides English, he spoke and wrote Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian).  Once, possibly when in a cynical mood, Wotton defined “ambassador” as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country” (he actually wrote in Latin, but never mind), thus capturing in one punning word the idea of temporary residence and the idea of strategic mendacity which diplomacy, from time to time, has found it necessary to employ.  My second example is more recent, and sadder.  It comes from Philip Larkin’s short poem “Talking in Bed,” which begins by remarking that the activity named in the title ought to be easy, because “lying together in bed goes back so far.”  It’s an elemental human activity.  For millennia men and women have lain together, often after having made love, and conversed.  For the twosome in Larkin’s poem, though, talk comes hard, and the silence deepens.  Perhaps she has said something like “do you love me?” and then “it doesn’t really matter . . .”  He, as Larkin imagines him, tries to respond, but

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

They are lying together in bed, and with each careful, hedging word they exchange they are lying together in bed.