Looking at little things

My reading, mostly online, recently turned up some revealing, often highly amusing examples of the dictum that truth is often found buried in details, that little things reveal a lot.

1.   In today's New York Times, the Opinion writer Gail Collins, who is gifted at finding an amusing perspective on the daily news, writes about guns and gun control.  At one point, she wonders why people "leave [guns] laying around the house."   The use of laying instead of lying here seems to reflect either the fact that the editor of the Times was careless, or, more likely, that the accepted standard for this often confused word has shifted:  "to lay" used to mean "to put something down" (it was followed by an object) whereas to lie meant to recline, to rest (oneself). Standards are set mainly by writers and editors of major publications like the Times, not by grammarians.

I often used to say to my doctor when he told me to "lay down" to be examined, that I will "lie down, thank you," and thereby lighten the mood with a distracting bit of English professorism.   I've now abandoned noting this distinction; even the most educated people seem to ignore the difference between lie and lay; I often find people laying down on the sofa in books and articles, especially when the tone is conversational, indicating a grammatical change akin to the shift from shall (still used in England) to will or to the rare use of whom, which now sounds very formal. All of this shows, of course, that language is constantly in flux, that there are no fixed rules, only conventional standards.

2.   Who knew that George Washington, father of our country, was an early cultivator of hemp (cannabis) who advised farmers in 1794 (long before it was outlawed), "make the most you can of the hemp and sow it everywhere."  This comes courtesy of Jeff Kacirk's "Forgotten English," a daily compilation of arcane historical lore.  His source is an 1844 Farmer's Encyclopedia, which recommends that the "fine oil" from hemp seeds is effective in expelling vermin from cabbage patches and discouraging caterpillars.   I'm glad that cannabis is now legal, more or less, and that its uses are so many and varied.