Lie, lady, lie

Mary Schmich, a Chicago Tribune columnist, recently wrote a column that began:

"Which of the following sentences is correct?

I am going to lay down under my desk and weep.

I am going to lie down under my desk and weep."

If you're a writer or an editor, it's good reading. She talks about her newsroom copy editor, who despite his "intellectual finesse," couldn't remember the right usage of lie v. lay. She says,

When someone with his intellectual finesse confuses "lie" and "lay," it's obvious that the distinction has been lost to all but the crotchety few.

And she explains further:

I blame the defeat of "lie" on the rise of yoga. Or maybe yoga class is simply where I've accepted recently that it's time for purists like me (purists such as me? such as I?) to surrender.

"Lay down on your backs for bridge pose."

"Lay down on your bellies for cobra pose."

I've heard yoga teachers say those things thousands of times. And thousands of times I've wanted to shout, "No!"

I've wanted to leap up and explain that "to lie" is to recline, "to lay" is to place.

You lay your yoga mat on the floor. Then you lie down.

It's true. Our language changes all the time. When my kids used to ask for grammar advice I'd look up a rule or two. But now I ask them to read a sentence aloud or break it apart. And then I say, "Keep it if it sounds right."

What my own Mrs. Gray--my aged seventh-grade grammar teacher, the one who wore wool, two-piece skirt suits and weighed about a hundred pounds, twelve of which were devoted to the stacked and teased hair bun on top of her head--would say about the new slackening of rules. She would say, "It will sound right if it is right. You will will learn to recognize right with practice."

There are days I wish she worked in the office next to mine. I could fritter away the rest of a long Monday afternoon picking her brain with all kinds of persnickety questions.