Feeling Tense!

[silk_noir]

What the tin fuck is going on with professional journalists who cannot seem to remember the past tense of verbs?

I'm talking verbs such as ground and shone.

Seriously, what the fuck kinda first-grade laziness is it to use shined and grinded?

Comments

[tedeisenstein]

[snort] Why am I tempted to say that those journalists not only don't know their past tenses, they don't know their past at all, and are doomed to repeat it, over and over.

(Sorry 'bout that; all the recent foofooraw about corporate interests and corporations and paying for governmental access and voting hit me when I was reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, who argued against those very same things - in 1911. I have yet to see any current journalist or reporter do any historical research at all that goes back more than 20 years on Progressives. It makes my historian's blood boil.)

Irregularities are ground away

[trimguy]

Moreso in uncommon vocabulary.

I offered my Latin students the following dialog.

T: What is the plural of child?
S: Children.
T: What is the plural of ox?
S: Umm, oxen.
T: In two hundred years the plural of child will still be children. The plural of ox will be oxes (if the word even still exists). But oxen has been around for the entirety of the history of the English language. Why is it doomed to die now? How often do you yoke up the oxen to the plow? Lack of regular use causes irregular forms to regularize. The opposite is also true. Thus the forms of the linking verb are the most conservative, and thus most irregular.

The next century will see the loss of many irregular past tense forms. I hope I have shined a light on the process.

Re: Irregularities are ground away

[ccjohn]

If oxen dies, we're screwed. Because irregularities stick around for a reason. Language begins as sounds. Irregularities reflect this. They're anti-normative.

Irregular past tense forms keep us from Newspeak. I'm with Orwell: we are stuck on guard against attempts at making language the slave of politics. Language begins with sounds linked to meaning across cultures in a way we don't understand. The word for the sound snakes make is similar across many languages, and so is the shape of the symbol, or letter, that represents the sound.

Bunch of silly gooses, in other words, thinking language obeys laws of a couple hundred years.

Re: Irregularities are ground away

[tedeisenstein]

...and JRRTolkien technically preferred "dwarfs" except he often used "dwarves", but admitted that "dwarrows" was the real, actual plural form.

If a philologist like him can't decide, who am I to disagree?

dumbass kind

[ccjohn]

Language ain't cheap. People are sloppy with it because they act like it's work. It's not. But I think it isn't laziness. I think it's fear of meaning something and standing by it.

Past participles state. Declare. I ran. I ate. It fell. I wonder sometimes, is it laziness, or squeamishness about declarative statements. The first thing that made me love the art stars was they cared only about meaning. They wanted to do what they wanted to do. If people were pissed off, TS. I admire this.