People are rightfully pointing out how ridiculous some of the overt substantive changes in that end poem are, but I was pretty amazed by how even the quite minor changes totally alter the feel of the thing too. "Sit on a couch and look at a wall" to "Laying on the couch and looking at the wall" loses a lot somehow in a hard-to-pin-down way. It's almost an impressively efficient butchering
"Sit" is from Middle English sitten, from Old English sittan, from Proto-West Germanic sittjan, from Proto-Germanic sitjaną, from Proto-Indo-European *sed- (“sit”). "Lay" is from Middle English lay, from Old French lai, from Latin laicus, from Ancient Greek λαϊκός (laïkós). In English, "sit" feels immediate and active where "lay" is passive and indirect. The distinction is both important and rooted in history. It is…
As a verb, "lay it down" has Germanic roots, e.g. "liegen". The Greek cognate seems to be "lexos", "bed". (All this from Skeat's etymological dictionary.)