You lie yourself and you lay something - the very basic thing.
For instance,
You lie down on the floor OVER
You lay a pot on the floor.
This is about the present tense.
I could not find anything better than simply putting GrammarGirl's excellent examples here, in-situ.
The past tense of lie is lay, so...
Last week, Steve lay down on the floor.
The cat lay in the mud after it rained yesterday.
The past tense of lay is laid, so
Last week, I laid the TPS report on your desk.
Mary forcefully laid her ring on the table.
The past participle of lie is lain (this is wonderful), so
Steve has lain on the floor for days.
The cat has lain in the mud for hours.
The past participle of lay is laid, so
I have laid the TPS report on your desk.
Mary has forcefully laid her ring on the table.
shoot & shot are film/movie & professional photographic terms.
shoot describes the 'event' at which film stock is used to make the movie/photographs.
The shoot is a general term for the entire occasion, at which there may be several hundred people, all doing different tasks that make up the event; from catering, locations & logistics, transport, carpenters & riggers, lighting specialists, sound recordists, cameramen & grips [camera movers], production crew, actors, director … all are on the same 'shoot'.
Stills & movie would be differentiated as
photo shoot / stills shoot or
film shoot / movie shoot.
'stills' is the movie term for non-moving pictures.
A stills photographer would call them shots or photographs, as there is no 'moving' alternative to cause confusion.
A shot is either
- The specific way the camera is lined up &/or moved, re-focussed etc., to point at the actors or scene, in order to film that one small section of the action, or
- for stills photography, either the above, or simply any one single photograph - whether it required an entire film crew to take it or not.
An aside… this is where we get the term "Who is calling the shots?"
The answer is - the Director.
Best Answer
This question could almost be closed as "too broad," but I'm going to take a stab at it. Just realize that my answer may not be 100% complete; these are versatile phrases that can be used in many ways.
I'm going so say that "very much" and "too much" (usually) mean two different things, and that "so much" can be a synonym for either one of them, depending on the context and the structure of the sentence.
I would say that, in general, too much means "more than the right amount," while very much means "a lot, but not necessarily to excess."
For example:
means she loves Bill a lot, while:
means she loves Bill more than she should. (Perhaps Linda is a lovestruck teenager with an unhealthy degree of infatuation, or maybe Bill is a celebrity, and Linda is a stalker.)
Given that, I would say that:
is generally synonymous with the first sentence (i.e., it's saying she loves him very much), not the second sentence (i.e., it's probably not saying that she loves him too much). That said, it could take on the meaning of the second sentence if we add a little more context to make it that way:
Another example, where these phrases are used in the negative:
means only put in a little bit, while
means only put in the amount that is required (it might be a lot), but not more than that. In this case:
is probably more closely aligned with too much cinnamon than with very much cinnamon. Again, though, it's hard to dissect the meaning of such simple sentences, because the same words can be used to convey different meanings with additional context. For example, if we are making the coffee cake, and I say:
that means: "Stop putting cinnamon in the coffee cake right now!" (That's enough cinnamon; any more than that will ruin the cake.)
However, if we are eating the coffee cake, and I say:
that means, "Next time you make coffee cake, use less cinnamon than you did this time." (There is too much cinnamon in this.)