" Olive, the other reindeer"; was Re: "Trolling" for "Trawling": An Eggcorn?

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:13 AM -0700 8/4/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I was scarred - I can remember lying awake waiting for the ax to
>fall - but I never had a problem parsing "now I lay me."
>
>   JL

Right; the scary line was definitely "If I should die before I wake"
(whether or not you understood this to imply postmortem zombiehood)
rather than the "Now I lay me down to sleep" opener, although I
suppose some proto-Chomskyan youngsters might have been kept awake by
the horrors of Principle B being violated.

LH

>
>Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Charles Doyle
>Subject: Re: " Olive, the other reindeer"; was Re:
>"Trolling" for "Trawling": An Eggcorn?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>I wonder how many individuals of my generation and older, as
>children, were permanently scarred by the morbid bedtime prayer
>commencing with that incantation in some arcane language (I believe
>I assumed it was Hebrew), "Now I lay me" (as I eventually learned it
>was spelled).
>
>--Charlie
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