This is not likely to endear me to Mike Birbiglia. (Celebrity Tweets)

I sat ...down ... at my desk to eat lunch (corn dog, slice of pizza, and banana which was rotten and I threw it away) and read my Twitter feed to see this tweet from Jimmy Kimmel,

And maybe it's just me but I instantly took issue with it, in part because comedians on Twitter often seem to be trying to hard to come up with something funny to say, rendering it unfunny, and in part because it's not true, also rendering it unfunny.

So I replied:

BECAUSE I am right.

Consider this sentence:

"When he heard the shot ring out in the middle of the night, Tony was so startled he sat."

What's the implication of that?  Was Tony walking around? Standing? Or lying down?

"When he heard the shot ring out in the middle of the night, Tony was so startled he sat in bed."

Again: what was Tony doing just prior to that shot?

"When he heard the shot ring out in the middle of the night, Tony was so startled he sat down in his bed."

MUCH MORE CLEAR.

So we need to say sat up or sat down because you can do both.

400+ people acted on that Tweet in one way or another, including Mike Birbiglia retweeting it, and not one of them had ever, it seems, sat up in bed.  WELL HOW DO THEY GET OUT OF BED, I'd like to know.  Do they roll out in the morning? Does a crane lift them bodily up to a vertical position?