Now I lie me down to sleep (said the editor)

So many mistakes with lie/lay occur that it does seem the distinction may have been completely lost, or is rapidly getting there. It’s still irritating in professional writing, though — at least, it is to some of us. New York magazine, May 12, 2008, page 33: “In the worst-case scenario, you could . . . lay down in the trough between the rails.” Oh, please. Nobody at the mag knew this was wrong? One verb is intransitive, one is not. It’s not nuclear physics.  

P. S.  Yet the mixup doesn’t seem so bad in certain song lyrics: Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” kinda seems to work. Maybe that’s because the key line–”Lay across my big brass bed”–is in fact taken from the blues world, and may somehow bring along the built-in ”distressed” quality of antique folk material (as with, say, double negatives).  On the other hand, Kenny Rogers’ “She Believes in Me” included the same error, but in a way – ”While she lays dreaming . . .” – that seems truly ugly. That’s a fairly old country hit, at this point, and may have been an “early adopter,” and so a leader in drilling the wrong usage into American ears. But country fans are a different demographic from professional editors, with different preferred usages (leastways, that used to be the case).