I was reading a bedtime story to my five-year-old last night—after spending forty-five minutes trying to locate a missing shoe that turned out to be in the microwave—and I swear to you, right there on page four of this supposedly professional children's book, it said 'The puppy wants to lay in the grass.' Not 'lie'. 'Lay.' I sat there in the dim illumination of a turtle-shaped nightlight, staring at the page while my kid was bouncing off the bedframe, and I just felt a deep, overwhelming exhaustion. When did transitive and intransitive verbs become optional? Lay requires a direct object. You lay a blanket down; you lie down on the rug. It isn't hard, or at least it shouldn't be, but everywhere I look now—parenting forums, school newsletters, news articles written by actual adults who allegedly have degrees—nobody seems to know the difference anymore. Someone on a neighborhood group yesterday posted 'I'm just gonna lay here until my migraine goes away' and when I politely mentioned the distinction, I got called a pedant and told 'words evolve.' That isn't evolution, that's just laziness. We are actively teaching the next generation that structural precision doesn't matter, and then we wonder why kids can't construct a coherent sentence. If we just throw away grammatical case and transitivity because people can't be bothered to remember basic grade-school grammar, what is even the point of language?