It's a losing battle, of course, the struggle to maintain a certain level of language and grammar. We've lost the fight for lie. Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay, was the title to a grammar guide a few years ago but it was already too late. I blame the child's prayer and Dylan for the compounded error. "Now I lay me down to sleep," it goes and people kept the Lay without realizing it has an object - me - who, which, that is being laid down. And Dylan sang "Lay, lady, lay" being another kind of lay, but people liked the sound of it, I suppose. Remember that line of Dorothy Parker's about some slut she knew: " If all the people she knew were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised."

. So you shout at your kids every night to lay down and perpetuate the mistake, drilled forever into their beds. Well, of course, no one knows the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs any more, so why would they care? I do. It hurts.