Merriam-Webster addresses hilarious viral moment from Dawn Staley press conference

All Dawn Staley needed was a bit of guidance on some proper grammar, and she ended up getting a lesson from the unimpeachable grammar kings of the internet: Merriam-Webster, the publishing company famous for dictionaries. And the question at hand was, frankly, comically trivial.

Staley, as head coach of the still undefeated and No. 1 ranked South Carolina women’s basketball team, has her team take some time each day to rest and lie down in the locker room. And Staley just needed to know: Does one lay down, or does one lie down?

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She originally posed the question to a room full of reporters at the Final Four, with a humorous twist.

“I told our coaches someone told me you lie to get laid, right?” Staley said to laughs.

And the technically correct answer, with respect to the rest period that Staley gives her team, is that her plays lie down to rest. As Merriam-Webster pointed out with a quote tweet on a video of Staley’s query.

“‘Lay’ has been used intransitively in the sense of ‘lie’ (‘lay’ down for a nap) since the 1300s,” the publisher said on social media. “The practice was unremarked until around 1770; attempts to correct it have been a fixture of schoolbooks ever since. So for centuries, no one cared… then one day someone did.”

Lay is a transitive verb, and used to describe someone setting something down or putting it on something. For example, one lays down a bed of soil to plant a garden and if they’re tired after doing so, they’ll lie down in bed.

However, Staley and most English speakers have used lay interchangeably with lie as an intransitive verb, much to the chagrin of collective English teachers.

And if you’re still search for more grammatical answers about laying, lying — or lying, as in being deceitful — then Merriam-Webster has a guide for you, and Staley.

Staley raved about her teams bond

Staley had to assemble an entirely new team — which entered the offseason seeing the “majority” of the team being “out of shape.” However, her team used that as a driving force heading into the season. They helped one another and held each other to the standard that’s been put on display down the stretch this season.

“They’ve created a bond that happened just — it wasn’t forced by the coaching staff,” Staley said ahead of the Final Four. “Obviously we like it to be a lot more disciplined and we like to adhere to the standards that we’ve had throughout the years that we’ve been successful and we found success in that correlation.

“And then this team pretty much blows up all of that like in one summer. And then they figure out a way to work together. I think a lot of that had to do with our performance coach, Molly Binetti, because she had the tall task, the very tall task — she said this was probably the most out-of-shape, really not-very-competitive team that she’s ever had to work with.”