Yesterday, writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker offered a delightful lesson on the perils of learning grammar from rock and roll lyrics. Among the grammatical malefactors are Bob Dylan, whose song "Lay, Lady, Lay" uses the verb
lay in an intransitive fashion instead of
lie. Likewise, Dylan sang "If not for you, babe, I'd
lay awake all night," and "I wanna
lay right down and die." But he should get points for using
lay in the transitive too, as in: "
Lay down your weary tune," or using
lay as the proper past-tense form of
lie: "I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he
lay." Still, if the foremost bard of American popular music can't be consistent on this point, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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It's an age-old quandary: what to do about the lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun in English? Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker tackles this grammatical stumbling block, drawing on her experience in the college classroom — on both sides of the pedagogical divide.
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