We have looked at one or two methods for creating horrible new verbs, but another way to lay siege to Good English is by misusing verbs that already exist. And it takes hardly a minute to realise that if this is to be one’s method, then the best area of attack is the past tense.
To peep through an in-depth grammar of Modern English is, for most of us, to discover what a head-spinning number of rules we faithfully observe despite having not the faintest idea that we know them. But never mind that: here we shall try to keep things simple. A regular English verb forms the past tense and the past participle with the suffix -ed, but irregular verbs achieve these ends in other, less regular ways. So, in regular fashion, wink gives winked and link gives linked. Less regularly, think gives thought, drink gives drank and slink gives slunk. Or consider that while knit gives knitted, sit gives sat and split remains unchanged. Sometimes the verbs that take -ed are referred to as ‘weak’ and irregular verbs whose vowel-sounds change as ‘strong’, though objectively there is nothing strong or weak about either.
It should surprise no one that with all these possibilities (and more), and given the idiosyncratic nature of English, not every verb stays in a single camp. For example, it is normal in today’s British English to use both burnt and burned, both kneeled and knelt, both quit and quitted. True, quitted may strike the up-to-date griper as more proper than quit, but across eight hundred years, usage has switched back and forth between the two. Sometimes one can even use different past-tense forms of a single verb in the same sentence without straying from what the most pedantic speaker would deem correct: ‘He lit a lamp, carried it aloft, and by its cheerful glow lighted his way’; or ‘He heaved a sigh of relief as the hotel hove into view’. Curiosities in the development of English have also bequeathed us certain habits in how we choose between competing past participles for use as adjectives, so that we say melted butter but molten gold; a bent back but a bended knee; a cleft palate but a cloven hoof; dumb-struck but poverty-stricken.
Do we object to this muddle? No. The silliest among us may even smile on discovering that in an entry on the past tense of the verb to creep—its permutations spanning well over a thousand years—the Victorian compilers of the OED found it helpful to refer to a line from the old Scottish poem ‘Will and Jean’ which describes how darkness crept across a far landscape, or rather, how ‘mirky shadow / Crap ower distant hill and plain’. (Modernisers of the dictionary have drawn a veil over this quotation, as they have over one about a fox who ‘creepit’ or ‘crap’ through a hole.)
Yet as with other topics, when it comes to the past tense, we find a list of special bugbears that the grumblers turn to for a spot of consensual stigmatising. One is the supposed fault of using hung instead of hanged when referring to execution: as Simon Heffer explains this, ‘Pictures and pheasants are hung, but a man is hanged’ (pheasants are hung when already dead). So there you have it—though ordinary English speech does not reliably mark this fine distinction, which happens to have arisen because the modern hang is derived from more than one antecedent verb. Another supposed area of confusion, across more than just the past tense, is one famously exemplified by a line from Byron’s work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In an address to the ‘deep and dark blue Ocean’ the poem notes that—by contrast with the ‘vile strength’ man successfully wields ‘For earth’s destruction’—out upon the ‘watery plain’, there is no ‘shadow of man’s ravage’;** after all, no matter how man casts himself upon the ocean, the ocean spits him back out again: ‘thou’, Byron writes, addressing the deep dark waters, ‘dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay’. At this, every good griper will recoil. Bill Bryson’s comment on lay and lie is that ‘in all their manifestations’ they are ‘a constant source of errors’.** Rather than cite Byron, Mr Bryson gives a quotation that begins ‘Laying on his back, Dalton …’, and remarks sternly: ‘Unless Dalton was producing eggs, he was lying on his back’. It is hard to see quite how Byron can have meant that the corpse of man, rejected by the ocean and washed ashore, should then produce eggs; but this certainly puts a good spin on a verse-ending that is otherwise a bit of a downer.**
But let us not worry too much about these select nuisances; far better to go for a more general approach—because what is marvellous about forming the English past tense incorrectly is the range in the type of offence this can cause. By going wrong, you may strike the indifferent critic simply as stupid. But should you come up against fully committed gripers, you will find that you can infuriate them in three particular ways: by seeming childish, facetious or—worst of all—American.
It is mostly the province of the child to treat as regular a verb that is conventionally irregular. Among the over-sixes, keep usually gives kept and eat gives ate: to say ‘My tooth came out but I keeped it’ or ‘I eated a biscuit’ is therefore likely to make you sound sickeningly babyish.** It is, however, just possible that something even worse is going on. Campaigners for the slogan ‘no means no’ must suffer pangs at the following squib from Alfred Crowquill’s Electric Telegraph of Fun, a compendium from 1854 of jokes designed to amuse gentlemen on boring railway journeys. In it, a scene is painted of a young man wooing a young lady: I was, he says, ‘about to imprint a kiss upon her lips, when she looked me saucily in the eyes, and with a smile upon her angelic countenance, she said, “don’t!” and I don’ted!’ Just as do gives did, don’t conventionally gives didn’t. But here the speaker understands don’t to mean ‘do’, or in other words: act. He therefore interprets don’t as a peculiar but regular verb, ‘to don’t’, and in response to the angelic young lady, acts, and kisses her, or—as he tells it—‘I don’ted’.
By contrast, for a writer to make a regular verb irregular in some way, or to make an already irregular verb differently irregular, speaks of play if the reader is charitable, and of airy facetiousness if not: I knat a woolly scarf; I squoze my lemon; ‘Spring is sprung the grass is riz’. There may be something childish about switching your irregular forms, but using the wrong irregular past tense usually suggests that you know the standard uses and are scrambling them on purpose. The OED, for example, marks it as a ‘Joc. variant’ when James Joyce writes in Ulysses, ‘Have a good old thunk’.**
But these two signals—infantile, playful—will be more than trumped by the dismay you are likely to cause a language purist if you can inspire the charge (frequently unjustified) that you are using an Americanism. Take dive. In current British English the past tense is usually weak: dived. In current American English it is often strong: dove. There is no consistency to this pattern. The British will happily say, ‘I skived off work and drove into a ditch’. But try remarking that you ‘dove into the pool’, and see what consternation you cause the average griper. Even worse, attempt a snuck. This strong past tense is increasingly successful in British English as a rival to the weak form sneaked. And as ever, there are those who greatly disapprove. For good measure, throw in an antiquated gotten, charitably preserved for us by the Americans and now on the rise again here, and you will be away.
You may be asking yourself what, really, is wrong with Americanisms. The answer you need to get hold of is that, from your perspective, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Americanisms. Then again, some Americans are dismayed by some Americanisms too. If ever you are accused of deploying one, you must reply with the chestnut ‘I could care less’.** Or if you are feeling bullish, point out to your critic that there are terms of American origin that the British would be loath to do without—nifty, bogus, pussyfooting, and so on; furthermore, that there are terms of American origin without which the staunchest upholder of British values might be hard-pressed to define Britishness—to define Englishness itself. The stiff upper lip to which so many of us pretend to aspire was born in the USA. So too was the underdog in whose support we wrongly imagine ourselves to be distinct.
On 12 March 1711, Addison wrote in The Spectator, ‘The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture’. But hey, constant and assiduous Culture may not be your thing. So although with non-standard past tenses you have the choice of seeming to be facetious, childish or American, and could therefore pick the effect most likely to leave your particular audience miserable, you could just decide to mix up your regulars and irregulars scattershot. Even if you settle for this second, slapdash approach, once you have snuck in a despised form or two, you will be able to tell yourself that you have contributed to the unstoppable forward march of language change. Naturally, the beleaguered griper will curse you and hope that you are wrong.