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

[sagehen]

>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
>-----------
Uh, what is Principle B?
I don't think I found the "If I should die before I wake" so much scary as
nonsensical, but I just filed it away alongside a lot of other archaic
notions embodied in fairy tales, &c.
I suspect there is another legacy of that grisly little prayer: the lie/lay
confusion.  Even though the transitive construction is legit, its use
instead of straightforward "lie down" probably in a fuzzy way seems to
legitimate the misuse that is nearly universal now.
AM

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