The American Language
reasons. The prevalence of speed contests [Pg203] of various sorts,
always to the intense interest of the proletariat, has brought such
words as /speeder/, /speeding/, /speed-mania/, /speed-maniac/ and
/speed-limit/ into daily use, and /speeded/ harmonizes with them
better than the stronger /sped/. As for /shoed/, it merely reveals the
virtual disappearance of the verb in its passive form. An American
would never say that his wife was well /shod/; he would say that she
wore good shoes. /To shoe/ suggests to him only the shoeing of
animals, and so, by way of /shoeing/ and /horse-shoer/, he comes to
/shoed/. His misuse of /to learn/ for /to teach/ is common to most of
the English dialects. More peculiar to his speech is the use of /to
leave/ for /to let/. Charters records it in "Washington /left/ them
have it," and there are many examples of it in Lardner. /Spit/, in
American, has become invariable; the old preterite, /spat/, has
completely disappeared. But /slit/, which is now invariable in English
(though it was strong in Old English and had both strong and weak
preterites in Middle English), has become regular in American, as in
"she /slitted/ her skirt."
In studying the American verb, of course, it is necessary to remember
always that it is in a state of transition, and that in many cases the
manner of using it is not yet fixed. "The history of language," says
Lounsbury, "when looked at from the purely grammatical point of view,
is little else than the history of corruptions." What we have before
us is a series of corruptions in active process, and while some of
them have gone very far, others are just beginning. Thus it is not
uncommon to find corrupt forms side by side with orthodox forms, or
even two corrupt forms battling with each other. Lardner, in the case
of /to throw/, hears "if he had /throwed/"; my own observation is that
/threw/ is more often used in that situation. Again, he uses "the
rottenest I ever seen /gave/"; my own belief is that /give/ is far
more commonly used. The conjugation of /to give/, however, is yet very
uncertain, and so Lardner may report accurately. I have heard "I
/given/" and "I would of /gave/," but "I /give/" seems to be
prevailing, and "I would of /give/" with it, thus reducing /to give/
to one invariable form, like those of /to cut/, /to hit/, /to put/,
/to cost/, /to hurt/ and /to spit/. My table of verbs shows [Pg204]
various other uncertainties and confusions. The preterite of /to hear/
is /heerd/; the perfect may be either /heerd/ or /heern/. That of /to
do/ may be either /done/ or /did/, with the latter apparently
prevailing; that of /to draw/ is /drew/ if the verb indicates to
attract or to abstract and /drawed/ if it indicates to draw with a
pencil. Similarly, the preterite of /to blow/ may be either /blowed/
or /blew/, and that of /to drink/ oscillates between /drank/ and
/drunk/, and that of /to fall/ is still usually /fell/, though
/fallen/ has appeared, and that of /to shake/ may be either /shaken/
or /shuck/. The conjugation of /to win/ is yet far from fixed. The
correct English preterite, /won/, is still in use, but against it are
arrayed /wan/ and /winned/. /Wan/ seems to show some kinship, by
ignorant analogy, with /ran/ and /began/. It is often used as the
perfect participle, as in "I have /wan/ $4."
The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost the
invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other dialects
of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general decay of the
perfect tenses. That decay has been going on for a long time, and in
American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the dialects of the
language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the most pretentious
written American it shows itself. The English, in their writing, still
use the future perfect, albeit somewhat laboriously and
self-consciously, but in America it has virtually disappeared: one
often reads whole books without encountering a single example of it.
Even the present perfect and the past perfect seem to be instinctively
avoided. The Englishman says "I /have/ dined," but the American says
"I /am through/ dinner"; the Englishman says "I /had/ slept," but the
American often says "I /was done/ sleeping." Thus the perfect tenses
are forsaken for the simple present and the past. In the vulgate a
further step is taken, and "I /have been/ there" becomes "I /been/
there." Even in such phrases as "he /hasn't/ been here," /ain't/ (=/am
not/) is commonly substituted for /have not/, thus giving the present
perfect a flavor of the simple present. The step from "I /have taken/"
to "/I taken/" was therefore neither difficult nor unnatural, and once
it had been made the resulting locution was supported by the greater
[Pg205] apparent regularity of its verb. Moreover, this perfect
participle, thus put in place of the preterite, was further reinforced
by the fact that it was the adjectival form of the verb, and hence
collaterally familiar. Finally, it was also the authentic preterite in
the passive voice, and although this influence, in view of the decay
of the passive, may not have been of much consequence, nevertheless it
is not to be dismissed as of no consequence at all.
The contrary substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle,
as in "I have /went/" and "he has /did/," apparently has a double
influence behind it. In the first place, there is the effect of the
confused and blundering effort, by an ignorant and unanalytical
speaker, to give the perfect some grammatical differentiation when he
finds himself getting into it--an excursion not infrequently made
necessary by logical exigencies, despite his inclination to keep out.
The nearest indicator at hand is the disused preterite, and so it is
put to use. Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to linger, and
there is a tendency to give it an /en/-suffix, thus bringing it into
greater harmony with its tense. I find that /boughten/, just
discussed, is used much oftener in the perfect than in the simple past
tense;[46] for the latter /bought/ usually suffices. The quick ear of
Lardner detects various other coinages of the same sort, among them
/tooken/, as in "little Al might of /tooken/ sick."[47] /Hadden/ is
also met with, as in "I would of /hadden/." But the majority of
preterites remain unchanged. Lardner's baseball player never writes "I
have /written/" or "I have /wroten/," but always "I have /wrote/." And
in the same way he always writes, "I have /did/, /ate/, /went/,
/drank/, /rode/, /ran/, /saw/, /sang/, /woke/ and /stole/." Sometimes
the simple form of the verb persists through all tenses. This is
usually the case, for example, with /to give/. I have noted "I /give/"
both as present and as preterite, and "I have /give/," and even "I had
/give/." But even here "I have /gave/" offers rivalry to "I have
/give/," and usage is not settled. So, too, with /to come/. "I have
/come/" and "I have /came/" seem to be almost equally [Pg206]
favored, with the former supported by pedagogical admonition and the
latter by the spirit of the language.
Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for the
perfect participle, it seems to be a tendency inherent in English, and
during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most formal
speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare's will show many
such forms as "I have /wrote/," "I am /mistook/" and "he has /rode/."
In several cases this transfer of the preterite has survived. "I have
/stood/," for example, is now perfectly correct English, but before
1550 the form was "I have /stonden/." /To hold/ and /to sit/ belong to
the same class; their original perfect participles were not /held/ and
/sat/, but /holden/ and /sitten/. These survived the movement toward
the formalization of the language which began with the eighteenth
century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites were driven
out. One of the last to go was /wrote/, which persisted until near the
end of the century.[48] Paradoxically enough, the very purists who
performed the purging showed a preference for /got/ (though not for
/forgot/), and it survives in correct English today in the
preterite-present form, as in "I have /got/," whereas in American,
both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regular /gotten/ is often
used. In the polite speech /gotten/ indicates a distinction between a
completed action and a continuing action,--between obtaining and
possessing. "I have /gotten/ what I came for" is correct, and so is "I
have /got/ the measles." In the vulgar speech, much the same
distinction exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by
the elision of /have/. Thus the two sentences change to "I /gotten/
what I come for" and "I /got/ the measles," the latter being
understood, not as past, but as present.
In "I have /got/ the measles" /got/ is historically a sort of
auxiliary of /have/, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in
the examples just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb. /To
have/, as an auxiliary, probably because of its intimate relationship
with the perfect tenses, is under heavy pressure, and [Pg207]
promises to disappear from the situations in which it is still used. I
have heard /was/ used in place of it, as in "before the Elks /was/
come here."[49] Sometimes it is confused ignorantly with a distinct
/of/, as in "she would /of/ drove," and "I would /of/ gave." More
often it is shaded to a sort of particle, attached to the verb as an
inflection, as in "he would '/a/ tole you," and "who could '/a/ took
it?" But this is not all. Having degenerated to such forms, it is now
employed as a sort of auxiliary to itself, in the subjunctive, as in
"if you had /of/ went," "if it had /of/ been hard," and "if I had /of/
had."[50] I have encountered some rather astonishing examples of this
doubling of the auxiliary: one appears in "I wouldn't had '/a/ went."
Here, however, the /a/ may belong partly to /had/ and partly to
/went/; such forms as /a-going/ are very common in American. But in
the other cases, and in such forms as "I had '/a/ wanted," it clearly
belongs to /had/. Sometimes for syntactical reasons, the degenerated
form of /have/ is put before /had/ instead of after it, as in "I could
/of/ had her if I had /of/ wanted to."[51] Meanwhile, /to have/,
ceasing to be an auxiliary, becomes a general verb indicating
compulsion. Here it promises to displace /must/. The American seldom
says "I /must/ go"; he almost invariably says "I /have/ to go," or "I
/have got/ to go," in which last case, as we have seen, /got/ is the
auxiliary.
The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are shown
in the following paradigm of /to bite/:
ACTIVE VOICE
/Indicative Mode/
/Present/ I bite /Past Perfect/ I had of bit
/Present Perfect/ I have bit /Future/ I will bite
/Past/ I bitten /Future Perfect/ (wanting)
/Subjunctive Mode/
/Present/ If I bite /Past Perfect/ If I had of bit
/Past/ If I bitten
/Potential Mode/
/Present/ I can bite /Past/ I could bite
/Present Perfect/ (wanting) /Past Perfect/ I could of bit
/Imperative/ (or /Optative/) /Mode/
/Future/ I shall (or will) bite
/Infinitive Mode/
(wanting)
PASSIVE VOICE
/Indicative Mode/
/Present/ I am bit /Past Perfect/ I had been bit
/Present Perfect/ I been bit /Future/ I will be bit
/Past/ I was bit /Future Perfect/ (wanting)
/Subjunctive Mode/
/Present/ If I am bit /Past Perfect/ If I had of been bit
/Past/ If I was bit
/Potential Mode/
/Present/ I can be bit /Past/ I could be bit