Taking It Lying Down

It was only when I myself became an English professor that I came to appreciate the serious confusion that most Americans entertain concerning my profession.  Whenever I was in social situations with what I shall call normal people—meaning people other than professional academics—I was nearly certain to hear some version of the following remark.  When I revealed my profession to my conversation partner—which I did only when forced to do so by a direct question—roughly eighty-five percent of the time this person would respond: “Well, I’d better watch my grammar.”  The implication was that most of my compatriots thought that what I did, to the limited degree that I might actually do something, was to invigilate their grammar.

This is a flattering though faulty assumption.  The slightest reflection on your everyday linguistic exchanges, or even occasional perusal of our magazines and newspapers, should be enough to demonstrate that nobody is playing that role.  Progressive educationists have determined that prescriptive grammar is an offensive idea.  Like keeping within the lines in the coloring book, having decent handwriting, or even knowing the difference between the written forms of majuscule and miniscule letters, it is a straight-jacket to be doffed, a limitation on a young student’s individuality, creativity, and unique expressive “potential”.

Only a few of us dinosaurs are much concerned about this any more.  I cannot rid myself of the belief that clarity of thought demands some clarity of expression, and that clarity of expression depends upon the rules, models, and historical “best practices” of the language of expression.  I used to talk about these things with various dinosaur colleagues, and especially with a close friend of forty years, one of the world’s leading students of Dante.  We have now been separated by the caprices of age and infirmity.  Widowed, he has moved far away to live with children and grandchildren, who are, as I well know myself, the succor and balm of senectitude.  Of course I miss talking with him directly, but I recently had the pleasure of what might be called the satisfying echo of a conversation.

Among the most common of vulgar linguistic errors is the confusion of the verbs lay and lie.  Both of these words, as nouns, have several meanings; but the basic distinction in their verbal form is that lay is transitive while lie is intransitive.  I lay the table, meaning that I place dishes, cutlery, napkins, etc. upon it preparatory to consuming a meal.  I lie upon, or lie down on my bed.  Brick-laying is an activity; being an outlier is a passive state.  That is the basic distinction, though of course there are various possible complications and anomalies connected with the usage of both words, as I have written about before.  As a  medievalist, I have very few anecdotes concerning famous writers I have known.  But I once did have W. H. Auden in my undergraduate rooms at Oxford.  He was inebriated and in pursuit of one of my classmates, a young Welsh language poet, who was also at the party.  Auden told us that his French translator had rendered his phrase a good lay (“a perfectly fine American expression” in Auden’s view) as un grand poème!
 

Anyway, Bob and I used to talk about stuff like lay and lie in our more general laments concerning the fall of civilization.  In terms of old fogeyism, he is even a little older and, if I may say so, even a little fogeyer than I am; but he is also way more productive.  Instead of just griping, he actually wrote a dandy little grammar book!  Thereby hangs a tale, though no dangling participle.

Over his last few years in Princeton my friend had to do some stints of rehabilitative physical therapy (PT, for short) in a couple of local facilities specializing in those arts.  I visited him a few times in these places, one of which is called the Saint Lawrence Rehab Center, housed in an old Catholic hospital or retirement home, and still having some partial or implicit religious connection.  I presume it derived its name from the fact that it is located in a town called Lawrenceville, but there are other possible associations.  Saint Lawrence is the one who, while being martyred on a barbeque grill, is supposed to have said to his tormentors, “You can turn me over now; I am done on this side.”  As I eventually have had to learn myself, that is roughly the experience of even modest callisthenic activity on a thoroughly deconditioned body.

 

 Saint Lawrence, patron saint of the NFL: They laid him on the gridiron, and he just had to lie there.

But by the time I learned some of the realities of PT, just a few weeks ago, a good deal of time had passed.  My friend moved away from Princeton the better part of a year ago, and I myself was continuing in ambiguous medical therapies that preserve one’s life at the necessarily tolerable expense of certain peripheral inconveniences.   In military lingo, the euphemism is “collateral damage.”  For me collateral damage has included neurological deficiencies in the lower extremities, uncertain balance and gait, and a generally undesirable limitation of confident ambulatory mobility.  So now it was I who found myself being shipped off a couple of hours a week to Saint Lawrence Rehab.

 It was quite an experience.  It is in the first place humiliating to be assigned  modest physical tasks of apparent simplicity but which turn out to be achievable, if at all, only with great effort and concentration.  One comes to appreciate anew the extraordinary complexity of one’s human body, and to acknowledge belatedly the near miracle to being able to perform simple movements one has never thought about until one is unable to make them.  Most of all I was impressed by the staff of the center—a group of intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced, good-humored professionals seriously devoted to helping people who need help.

Though various therapists helped me, there was one very nice young lady designated as the “supervisor” of my case.  I liked her immediately.  She made me try to walk toe-to-toe, stand on one leg with my eyes closed, and perform other impossible circus tricks.  Toward the end of the first session she turned to haunch and back “arching”, to be performed in a prone position, face down, on a kind of large bed.  “For this one,” she said, “you need to lay down over there.”  You remember the scene in the old Western.  Hero comes into the bar through the swinging doors to find forty-two drunk miners playing cards and one beautiful young woman in a prom dress.  His line: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”  That was exactly how it was when she told me to lay down.  “Look,” I said “You are obviously a very nice person and very good at your important job.  But I am an English professor, and I simply have to explain to you the difference between the words lay and lie.”  I thought this was a little bold, but she took it in stride.  “Oh,” she said, “another one.  Just so long as you don’t give me a copy of your grammar book.”