The phrase "a sort of lay" is not standard in written English and may cause confusion.
It could be used in informal contexts to describe a type or manner of laying something down, but it is not commonly recognized.
Example: "He had a sort of lay that made the painting look more dynamic."
Alternatives: "a kind of lay" or "a type of lay".
Holroyd warns fellow biographers against what Daniel Defoe called "a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart at which, by degrees, the habit of lying enters in".
A more nuanced ethical issue involves the potential use of neuroimaging as a sort of lie detector to expose malingerers or increase payouts in injury-compensation suits.
Mr. Oates grew to believe that these speech reversals contained subconscious messages, and since then he has advocated their use in therapy and investigation (where they serve as a sort of lie detector test).
A tale of history tinged with mystery caught the attention of the Orange County, N.Y., hamlet of Southfields yesterday, as two amateur historians declared that in their midst (sort of) lay the bones (maybe) of a heretofore unknown descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
You also had to provide them the source documents and sort of lay it out, one, two and three".
"And to sort of lay out there that somehow this should be everybody's goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work" of people who don't attend college.
In Paul Bew's seminal work, "Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006," he includes a passage from a magazine article written at the height of the famine: "In a sort of hutch there lay four skeletal children... death-stricken.
"They're cycling in what's called a recumbent position, where the rider is sort of lying down on his back".
You could even call it lying - the sort of lying that involves stretching an unlikely possibility into fact.
