eufeme:

I dream of the day when I won’t have to look at this fucking chart….

And here I’d thought everyone (except me) had given up on the distinction…

Seriously, though, I think intransitive to lie is on its way out. I see lay used for both even by professional journalists, at least online (maybe they don’t have copy editors?). I’m pretty sure the only reason I have the distinction firmly in my idiolect is because my mother was a copy editor. I’m a walking archaism.

But try as I might to be a good descriptive linguist, intransitive lay *just sounds wrong* to me. So I’m happy to encourage people to continue using this chart for their writing 🙂