Who Lays Dying; or, Lie, Lady, Lie

Our first text today is from E. L. Doctorow, whose command of American English one shouldn’t have reason to doubt. In his foreword to the new Modern Library edition of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Doctorow says, after summing up Faulkner’s drive to be an innovative writer, “And so now we are here with the Bundrens, a down-at-the-heels family of dirt farmers in Yoknapatawpha County. Who lays dying is Addie Bundren, the mother.” 

Did that last sentence not give you pause? Back in Doctorow’s adolescence—in the 1940s—no English teacher would have let pass a failure to distinguish properly between “lie” and “lay.” She—or he—would almost certainly have hewn to the distinction set forth these days in the latest edition of the fussbudgety Chicago Manual of Style:

lay; lie. Lay is a transitive verb—that is, it demands a direct object {lay your pencils down}. It is inflected lay–laid–laid {I laid the book there yesterday} {these rumors have been laid to rest}. (The children’s prayer Now I lay me down to sleep is a good mnemonic device for the transitive lay.) Lie is an intransitive verb—that is, it never takes a direct object {lie down and rest}. It is inflected lie–lay–lain {she lay down and rested} {he hasn’t yet lain down}.

In other words, the title of Faulkner’s novel has it right; “lay” is used as the past tense of “lie.” Doctorow, by contrast, has seized upon the wrong verb, at least from a stickler’s point of view.

Perhaps, the memorable paradox of Faulkner’s title colored the wording of the sentence in question. More likely, though, Doctorow has absorbed what is a nearly standard usage in the twenty-first century. I doubt that anyone would have a problem with “Who lies dying is Addie Bundren.” The conjugation of “lie” is nested in any literate person’s mind. “Lay,” however, is so pervasive a substitute for “lie” that articulate people in publishing and journalism use it instinctively. (“What a rotten author I’ve had to deal with! I want to go home and lay down.”)

“Lie” could sound wrong, though. Unless Bob Dylan had wanted his lover to misrepresent his misdeeds, would he have written a song called “Lie, Lady, Lie”? He might have urged her to “lie across his big brass bed,” but his deliberately countrified song-writing style could only have led him to “Lay, Lady, Lay.” (And no approximate poet would have passed up the assonance of the “-ay” sound.) So Dylan crooned, “Lay across my big brass bed.” And it’s hardly a stretch to suppose that he was also thinking of “lay” in a transitive sense; he wasn’t looking to just hold hands.

Dylan’s album Nashville Skyline was released in 1969, and in the decades since “lie” has largely ceded ground to “lay.” Though Dylan may not have been a significant influence in this shift, he could well have helped license the use of “lay” among my cohort in college at that time, whose grammar school and secondary school education would not have differed much, at least in terms of syntax and usage, from Doctorow’s of twenty or more years before.

There are some who would say that language evolves because it’s an organic entity, and I would mostly agree. But biological entities and linguistic entities are fundamentally different. (When I earn my Ph.D. in philosophy sometime in the next twenty years, I’ll explain why.) The organic nature of language is fundamentally different, I suppose (or propose), because it doesn’t have strict DNA, according to which a slippage in syntax has an unequivocal logical consequence.

What I do think matters is whether a verb takes a direct object or doesn’t. The problem with favoring “lay” over “lie” is a failure to feel that the verb is directed at something beyond itself or is simply directed at its condition.

I lie down. I lay the table. She lay on the table. He lies in the shadows. She lays the book on the sideboard. I have lain with my enemies and have risen with fleas. He laid down the law. She laid the guy she most loved. If I’m a hugely wealthy tax dodger, I lie to the IRS {different verb!}.

Gradations of verb use matter. To the degree those gradations get blurred, the language is degraded. And we are less able to articulate what we mean.