I got
Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan (2005) at our library; an earlier reader had taken a pencil and made a very few amendments to the printed text, mostly picky preposition choices. Then came this sentence on p. 285 of the hardcover:
[an Al-Quaida agent] "had arrived at a coastal village in northern Kenya, settled in and married a local girl, then bought a house with the diary and laid low for several years."
Earlier Reader had drawn his pencil through "laid" and inserted "lay" above it.
To lay low appears quite intransitive, and on the strength of this post, I have to conclude that Earlier Reader wins the point and Kaplan (now on the Atlantic's masthead as a national correspondent) and the Random House editors missed one. In what is an excellent book, withal.
Cheers, Trevor
A couple of quick comments.
... (bolding and underlining in the above excerpt is mine)
#1)
diary -- most likely a typo (in the original publication or in the copying by OP?), it probably ought to be "
dowry".
#2)
laid -- might be a typo or maybe not; perhaps it ought to be either the simple past-tense "
lay" or the past participle "
lain".
That is: had arrived, (had) settled in, (had) married, then (had) bought, (had) lain low / (or "lay low" if this and the previous verb were meant to be in simple past-tense).
BUT, if the author had intended to use an "intransitive
lay", then his usage of "laid" (for either as a simple past-tense or as a past-participle) is correct.
#3)
to lay low -- Perhaps the idiomatic usage they were relying on is from "
to lie low". (Which you--the OP--was probably pointing out, as Kaplan's usage did seem to be wanting an intransitive sense.)
In my computer's dictionary,
New Oxford American Dictionary, for the entry
LIE is the idiom "(to) lie low":
lie low (esp. of a criminal) keep out of sight; avoid detection or attention : at the time of the murder, he appears to have been lying low in a barn.
But then, if that excerpt was from heavily voiced narrative or from dialogue, then that possible (mis)use of
laid (for
lain or
lay) might have been intentional. (Also, see my previous comment #2.)
.
.
Historically, there has been some overlap in usage with the verbs
lie and
lay; for instance, the use of an "intransitive
lay" has been rather not uncommon a couple of centuries ago and it is still somewhat not uncommon in present-day speech. Though nowadays, this forcing a separation between the two verbs--forcing
lie to be mostly intransitive in meaning and
lay to be mostly transitive--is sort of used as an educational or social shibboleth by many people. This issue is taken up in more detail in a
usage dictionary, and does make some interesting reading, maybe.
(Aside: My usage dictionary mentions an old use of "lay" with a reflexive pronoun that has the same meaning as
lie down: "Now I lay me down to sleep." It also has included an interesting excerpt:
... I laid me down flat on my belly--Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719. And the usage dictionary continues with: "
Evans says that the pronoun dropped out but was understood, giving intransitive lay
. Then we have some idioms in which lay
functions intransitively: ...")
I mean, if someone was really interested in this issue of "
lie vs
lay".