I was still thinking about irregular verbs when I got home yesterday, so I decided to run the suspect sentence past my 17-year-old son. I asked him how he felt about this sentence: She laid naked on the bed.
"It should be lay," he said.
Then I asked, "Can you think of any context in which it would be appropriate to say 'She laid naked on the bed'?"
Without a pause he replied, "Only if it's talking about someone named Naked."
It's frightening the way that boy thinks. People are always telling me, "Of course your kid's a good writer; his mother's an English professor!" Or, "Of course he aced the SAT writing test! Look who his mother is!" As if he were just little remote-control writing robot responding to commands from my joystick. Do people really think I drill my children in irregular verbs at the dinner table and critique their journal entries on road trips? Or do they suspect me of spiking their Kool-Aid with secret herbal aids guaranteed to promote proper syntax?
The fact is that my son never lets me look at his writing. The only reason I know he's a good writer is that he sometimes accidentally leaves essays on my computer, where I exercise a mother's prerogative and read them. They're good, but I don't claim any credit for the fact that both of my children can wield words with creativity and grace. They grew up surrounded by books and learned to love reading, but their writing skills are solely their own. I certainly never drilled my son on the distinction between lie and lay, and if he cares enough about the language to have mastered that distinction, that's a testament to his talent and not mine.
On the other hand, maybe it's all genetic--in which case let's all congratulate ourselves for possessing good grammar genes, give up trying to teach our students the distinction between lie and lay, and dedicate the rest of our lives to promoting better grammar through eugenics.
You first.
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