Laying Low

Last week a friend texted to see if I wanted to go out for dinner. I was recovering from some minor surgery and had been told to stay mostly indoors and take it easy. So I texted back a regretful no and added, “I’m just laying low this weekend.”

I stared at the sentence on my phone (having not yet hit send) and thought, “Wait, is it ‘laying low’?”

Another voice in my head responded, “No, it must be ‘lying low.’ It’s clearly intransitive.”

“But,” I protested (in my head), “‘laying low’ sounds better. ‘Lying low’? That doesn’t sound idiomatic at all.”

In the end, though, my inner grammando won the day: I changed it to “lying low” before sending the text. But I knew I wouldn’t say it out loud.

In the week since then, I have been doing some informal polling of my academic friends, and at least half of them, including some fellow linguists, have opted for “laying low.” It just sounds better, we reassure one another.

Much has been written on the lie-lay question, including here (by Ben Yagoda) and here (by Geoff Pullum) on Lingua Franca and here on Grammarphobia. We know that lie is the intransitive verb (e.g., I am lying down); lay is the transitive verb, the causative of lie (e.g., I am laying down the placemats). And we know that there are at least a couple of centuries of history of lay being used for lie (i.e., intransitive lay), as well as some uses of lie for lay (perhaps especially in the confusion between the past participles lain and laid). One primary source of confusion is the fact that the past tense of intransitive lie is identical with the present of transitive lay.

I’m not going to say that I never have to think about the lie-lay distinction in a phrase like the boxes lay on the floor (which is technically correct). But the historically “correct” intransitive use of lie and transitive use of lay sound idiomatic to me. Except for lying low. And lying in wait, for that matter. To my ear and eye, it’s laying low and laying in wait.

The history of lay low in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the earliest appearance of the phrase (in the Middle English period) is transitive, with the meaning of physically knocking down: lay something/someone low—as in, the lightning laid the trees low, or, from Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, “For I wene this day to ley thee as low as thou laydest me.” It came also to mean ‘to kill’ or, more mildly, ‘to reduce to weakness.’

The phrase lie low, intransitive, also shows up in Middle English, again with a more literal meaning, in this case ‘to lie on or below ground’ or ‘to crouch low.’ It’s not until 1845 that the OED cites the first instance of lie low in the sense of ‘to stay out of sight [for a criminal]’ or ‘to keep a low profile.’ And right around the same time, lay low appears as a variant of lie low, with the same meaning. Take this example from 1833: “I determined to obey one of our backwoods sayings, ‘Lay low and keep dark stranger’” (The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of Tennessee).

A search of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows that intransitive lay low is easy to find in speech. Here’s Bill Maher in 2009: “Just lay low for a while, Sarah” (CNN Newsroom). And Bret Baier, of Fox News, in 2012: “Friends and supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards paid his mistress more than $9,000 a month to lay low.”

And in case you’re thinking intransitive lay low is just colloquial, I need to point out that it is slipping by editors of newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, too. Here’s the Chicago Sun-Times in 2008: “To the contrary, the people in power are laying low, either because they’re frightened of the Chinese or enjoy hopping into the financial bed with them.” This passage pops up from The New York Times in 2003: “A notch below Ms. Zall are mid-level managers, some of whom have become expert at holding onto their jobs. One, who declined to be named, said the way to last in government is to lay low.” And from the ABA Journal in 2006: “When legislative proposals for reform were in the hopper, it seems most defense lawyers chose to lay low rather than express an opinion, especially if it was critical.”

My gut is that some of these specific phrases with intransitive lay, such as lay low, may get accepted more generally before unaccompanied intransitive lay does. These phrases are just laying the groundwork and laying low, already dipping below the radar of some editors (and at least one linguist — until last week).