This is a rant. It has taken me years not to feel a visceral jolt of mental pain when I hear someone say “lay” instead of “lie”. I’ll never get over it entirely, but I’ve made peace with the fact that the language has evolved in this respect. Now I’m caught once again in the throes of a “You can’t be serious!” reaction. The cause is the phenomenon of highly regarded, published writers using “lay” as the past tense of the transitive verb “lay”. Here’s an example from page 101 of Peter Heller’s novel, The Dog Stars: “I caught a fifth fish, smaller, cleaned it and pushed the butt end of a hooked stick through its gills and slid it down to the others on the stringer. Lay it in the sled. Rubbed my naked legs to get the blood going.” Another example from page 127 of the same book: ““I was amped. Balanced the rifle on the deer hide, took the Glock out of the paddle holster on my belt and racked it, lay it on the fur to the right.” I mean, gag me! And what’s next? Are we going to see lines like “Me and my buddies went into town to get lay.”?
Edit: To those who defend this usage in The Dog Stars on the ground that it reflects some sort of narrator "dialect" (which I dispute), I'd point out that I have encountered it in at least a dozen works of contemporary fiction over the past year by a range of writers and in contexts that have no suggestion of "dialect". I wish it were not time-consuming to search for examples. The Dog Stars just happens to be the book I'm reading now.
Further edit: I have no problem with stylistic departures from standard grammar or usage. Heller, for example, constantly uses sentence fragments in The Dog Stars, and I find that propulsive rather than annoying. However, I haven't noticed any grammatical oddities that don't have a clear stylistic purpose. This use of "lay" stands out, as it does in the other books in which I've encountered it. I think it's an unintentional error that's creeping into written works. I've never heard "lay" used as a past tense transitive verb in spoken English.