I had just lied down to rest when no sooner did I discover that I was being untruthful.

This week, whilst teaching on the subject of past tense verbs, I discovered that nestled within my instinctive understanding of past participles there lay a dirty secret; I was lying.  The problem lies in the usage of the two differing verbs. A lie is of course an untruth, therefore one could say, “I lie when I say that I said I lied as I had not yet lied”. My error lay in the past participle of lie, to rest in a horizontal fashion, which should read, “I lie on the bed in which I lay before I had lain down at all”; clearly a lie, or perhaps a mere ambiguity.

I feel this matter has now been somewhat laid to rest.