The snow lays

A while back I posted on merging verbs - particularly "lie" and "lay".

Today it occurs to me that there may be more at work than I said there. For instance in the common phrase (common this time of year, anyway) "the snow lays":

The snow lays on the branches like small clouds with the needles of the tree peeking out.

The snow lays thinly, but it does indeed lay. Today is St. Nicholas' Day, which means it's the day we get out our artificial tree

As long as the snow lays on the ground we don't have to look too closely.

At 4:00, the thermometer squats on 32 and the snow lays 4 inches deep on the car, on the street, on the ground. Sophie, the half husky, loves it

In the shadow areas of the mountains the snow lays all year long.

Then the snow lays on the curbs in dirty piles for months.

The Stroudsburg Daily Times reported: "The snow lays between two and three feet deep on the Pocono."

Up here, where the snow lays thick and the wind doth blow, just below, where the air hangs grey and the fields shiver green. This really does demonstrate ...

March 20--A heavy snow fell last night so that the N.N.H.R. [railroad line] was obstructed The snow lays in drifts, and is about six inches on the level." ...

Library of the World's Best Literature: Ancient and Modern by Edward Cornelius Towne - 1897
—-and the snow lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere hills. ...

Look at photos of snowy pines and bare winter saplings, study how the snow lays on the branches.

The Story of Michael the Snowman
You see, this Village is in the frozen north where the snow lays on the ground all winter so Michael was like a member of the family to all the people in the Village ...

I’ll take you to the park; the snow lays perfectly there because of how flat the terrain is.

(Note the 1897 quote - and this is just a simple Google search; this has been going on a long time.)

What's going on here? Notice that none of these are simple intransitive constructions - not one is just "the snow lays." All of them are followed by an adverbial, either an adverb (such as "thinly" or "perfectly") or a prepositional phrase functioning as an adverbial of time or place ("on the ground," "on the branches," "for months") - or both ("on the ground all winter").

Many of the examples I found with "raise" are similiar:

Mist raises from Tuolumne Meadows on a autumn morning

"His music is the perfect backdrop for the late nights of empty street calm, when the fog raises from below the streets and traffic lights flash."

This looks less like a confusion between "lay" and "lie" - a misuse of the transitive - than a perfectly legitimate use of the middle voice, which is characterized by the recipient (direct object) being used as the subject of the sentence (as in the passive) with the transitive verb in its usual form (not the passive), no actor expressed - or generally even possible, and an adverbial modifier. Familiar uses include Campbell's motto "The soup that eats like a meal," as well as "the book reads well" or "like part of her life," or "she doesn't frighten easily."

Which is not to say that there isn't some confusion of the two verbs in these pairs going on - especially in the transitive "rise" examples such as "rise me up" or "Will this be an excuse to rise prices elsewhere?" It's just a thought that some of the uses may be perfectly okay.