American Language Supplement 2
Page 53
444. [The subjunctive … is virtually extinct in the vulgar tongue. One never hears “if I were you,” but always “if I was you.” In the third person the -s is not dropped from the verbs. One hears, not “if she go,” but always “if she goes.” “If he be the man” is never heard; it is always “if he is”.] In a few counter-phrases, used now and then by the folk, the old form survives, e.g., “be that as it may” and “far be it from me,” but they carry an air of conscious sophistication. In ordinary talk the conjugation given in AL4, p. 444, prevails, to wit, If I am, if I was and if I hadda been. On higher levels, of course, the subjunctive shows more life, and there is ground for questioning the conclusion of Bradley, Krapp, Vizetelly, Fowler and other authorities that it is on its way out. Charles Allen Lloyd has shown1 that it is still to be encountered plentifully in the newspapers2 and even on the radio. But Thyra Jane Bevier has produced plenty of evidence3 that it is by no means as often found in American writing as it was a few generations ago. “It was never actively alive in America,” she concludes, “except about the period from 1855 to 1880.”
1 The Levels of Language, Educational Method, March, 1937, p. 291.
2 The Druid, VI, May 23.
3 A Vocabulary or Collection of Words Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America; Boston, 1816, p. 171.
4 A Short But Comprehensive Grammar; third edition; Boston, n.d., p. 84. Staniford’s first edition appeared in 1807.
1 Oxford, 1905, pp. 284 and 285. It is also included in Vol. VI of his English Dialect Dictionary; Oxford (reissue), 1923.
2 The Verbs of the Vulgate, American Speech, Jan., 1926.
3 Hypercorrect Forms in American English, American Speech, Oct., 1937, p. 173.
4 Boston, 1829, p. 207. Kirkman does not include it in his lists of New England, New York, Middle Atlantic, Southern and Irish solecisms. H. A. Shands, in Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi, 1893, says: “The uneducated of Mississippi … use seen and seed for saw, seed for seen, saw for seen, and sometimes see for saw.”
5 The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 307–15.
1 John S. Farmer, in his Americanisms Old and New, London, 1889, p. 108, says of this: “Now common in England, but of California origin.”
2 Partridge says that it originated in the United States before 1850 and was naturalized in England c. 1858.
3 Supplement I, p. 300.
1 There are examples in Harper’s Magazine, April, 1860, p. 710, and July of the same year, p. 277.
2 Vol. III, Part 2, Map 639.
3 pp. 427–36 and 444.
4 Vol. III, Part 2, Map 677.
5 Messrs. Leland O. Hunt and Roger A. Johnson, of New York, call my attention to the fact that be is rarely encountered in the United States in the third person singular.
6 In a translation of the First Epistle General of John into the Sussex dialect (Click, June, 1938, p. 13) Chapter I opens with: “It be about what has been from the beginning.” Richard Paget says in The Nature of Human Speech, S.P.E. Tract No. XXII, 1925, p. 31, that the following paradigm also survives in the West Country: I be, thou be, he be, we be, you be, they be.
7 Vol. I, pp. 715–18.
1 The negative forms, ain’t, amn’t, an’t and aren’t are discussed in AL4, pp. 51, 160, 202 and 445, and Supplement I, pp. 404–06. See also Ain’t I and Aren’t I, by Raven I McDavid, Jr., Language, Jan.-March, 1941, pp. 57–59.
2 Reissue; Oxford, 1923, Vol. 1, p. 90.
3 The Druid, No. VI, May 16.
4 J. O. Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words; London, 1847, called it “a common participle,… but more extensively used in America.” Thomas Wright (not to be confused with Joseph) in his Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English; London, 1862, did not mention it.
5 New York, 1937, p. 62.
6 Bobble, by G. M. Beerbower, Dec. 6, 1937.
1 The Druid, No. VI.
2 Published at Bellows Falls, Vt. See New England Provincialisms, 1818, by P. G. Perrin, Dialect Notes, Vol. V, Part IX, 1926, pp. 383–4.
3 The Leatherwood God, by W. D. Howells; New York, 1916.
4 For example, Jackdaw, a very popular writer on speech, in John o’London’s Weekly, March 25, 1938. E. B. Osborn had written “when the full force of Liberal rancour was unloosed against him” in the London Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, and a correspondent at Torquay had asked for light upon it. Jackdaw replied: “E. B. O.… might, had he wished, have written loosed, but he preferred unloosed, rightly I think. But why? Because here unloosed describes a slower and more reasoned act than loosed. It contemplates a rancour that has been chained up, not held ready on the leash: it had to be unloosed before it could be loosed, and by so much the more was deliberate.”
5 Loadened, by J. D., Aug., 1930, p. 495.
6 Traced to 1535 by the NED but described as rare. In the adjectival form of ill-shapened it was found in Pills, Petticoats and Plows, by Thomas D. Clark, 1944, by a correspondent of American Speech, Oct., 1945, p. 186.
1 The last three, found in the Lawrence (Mass.) Telegram, Aug. 13, 1927, by Steven T. Byington, were discussed in American Speech, Dec., 1927, p. 163, by Louise Pound.
2 Headline in the Washington Daily News, Feb. 17, 1947, p. 9: “AYD’s Aim is to Pinken U.S. College Students.” AYD is a Communist-sponsored organization, American Youth for Democracy.
3 “He was found lying by the roadside soddened with drink.” Reported in American Speech, April, 1928, p. 350.
4 “Let us safen your brakes.” Reported in American Speech, April, 1931, p. 305. Also in The Changing Word, Minneapolis Journal, June 16, 1935.
5 “That diet ought to be thinnening.” Reported in American Speech, Sept., 1927, p. 515.
6 Reported from Maryland, Illinois, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee by Wentworth.
7 Sherwin-Williams Home Painting Handbook and Catalogue, 1943, p. 10.
8 “My team stalded on the way to town.” Recorded by Wentworth in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Kentucky.
9 Found by Wentworth in Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia.
10 The last two are ascribed to the Middle West by Wentworth.
11 E. J. Harrison, in Verb Wanted, London Observer, June 30, 1935, called attention to the curious fact that English has produced no antonym to to cheapen. He suggested various possibilities, e.g., to enhance, but rejected them all as unsatisfactory. To dear was in use in the Fifteenth Century, but is long obsolete and forgotten.
12 New York, 1940, p. 60.
13 An interesting discussion of some of them is in Lost Preterites, Every Saturday, Oct. 16, 1869, pp. 481–92.
1 See AL4, p. 430, n. 5. In Hiawatha, VII, Longfellow wrote: “Straight into the water Kwasind dove.” For the history of some of these forms in America see The Verbs of the Vulgate in Their Historical Relations, by Henry Alexander, American Speech, April, 1929, pp. 307–15.
2 Third edition; Oxford, 1879, pp. 261–64.
3 Molten, of course, is in use as an adjective.
4 Many of these survive in Wright’s English Dialect Grammar, and some, e.g., holp, are listed by Wentworth.
5 Fourth edition; New York, 1870, p. 334.
6 From Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in 1946: “The commercial program, paid for and in many instances also selected, written, casted and produced by advertisers and advertising agencies, is the staple fare of American listening.” I take this from the Editor & Publisher, March 23, 1946, p. 8. See AL4, pp. 197 and 439.
7 Accountant Writer, by Giff Cheshire, Author & Journalist, Dec., 1945, p. 8: “I was not required to bleed for my country, but I sweat.”
8 Joseph William Carr reported he takened in A List of Words From Northwest Arkansas, Dialect Notes, Vol. III; Párt II, 1906, p. 160.
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p; 1 I am indebted to Dr. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., for the addition of I etten, common in the South.
2 The New York Times, Aug. 29, 1936, p. 23, quoted Fries, lately cited, as saying that “in the past tense it should be agreed that the past tense of ring could be either rang or rung; of sing, either sang or sung; of sink, either sank or sunk; of shrink, either shrank or shrunk; of spring, either sprang or sprung; and for the participle of the verb show, either showed or shown.”
3 In the negative there is no equivalent of he done; the form is always he didn’t, usually pronounced di’n’t or di’n’.
4 Caption under a picture in the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, July 25, 1924: “Turnbull captured it with his hands … and drug it out,” i.e., a 46-pound catfish out of a mudhole.
5 I am indebted to Mr. Alexander Kadison for the following from a poem entitled Old Homes, in Verses by the Way: Third Series; New York, 1927, p. 47, by James Henry Darlington (1856–1930), Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Harrisburg, Pa.:
Sidesaddles, clocks, old portraits of fair women and strong men;
Tin candle-molds; sand-shakers, to dry the ink of goose-quill pen;
The pop corn; hams and strings of sage; herbs from the rafters hung;
A flintlock gun; three-cornered hat that from battle grandsire brung.
The Rev. Robert Forby says in The Vocabulary of East Anglia; London, 1830, that I have brung was used there, during the last twenty years of the Eighteenth Century, as often as I have brought. It was from that region, as we have seen in Chapter VII, Section 1, that many of the early American immigrants, especially to New England, came.
6 I am indebted here to Mr. Gilbert Chambers, of Newark, N. J.
7 Vance Randolph, in The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, Oct., 1927, p. 2, says that the Ozark conjugation of to take runs as follows:
Indicative Subjunctive
Present I take Ef I take
Present perfect I have tuck
Past I taken Ef I taken
Past perfect I had tuck Ef I had of tuck
Future I will take
1 Robert J. Menner, in Hypercorrect Forms in American English, before cited, p. 173, says that he has also heard he lied, apparently another unintended by-product of the schoolma’am’s admonitions. In American Speech, June, 1927, p. 408, a correspondent reported finding underlain in a book by a professor at Teachers College, Columbia.
2 Reported as prevailing in the Ozarks by Randolph, just cited.
3 See Thornton, Vol. II, pp. 831–32.
4 Usually followed by up. I find the following in the London Observer, June 21, 1936: “The epidemic of strikes … has threatened to include the concierges, among whose claims is one to the effect that they be no longer liable to be woken up at any hour of the night.” I am indebted here to the late F. H. Tyson.
5 Pled, which is ancient in English, has been creeping back into good usage of late. Pickering, in his Vocabulary of 1816, said that it was then “in the colloquial language of the Bar in New England.” It was denounced as an Americanism in the Port Folio, Oct., 1809. But George Bernard Shaw used it in The Sanity of Art; London, 1907. I am indebted here to Mr. H. W. Seaman.
6 Under date of March 2, 1940, Mr. W. C. Thurston, of Salisbury, Md., sent me a clipping from the local Times including “Group singing lended an atmosphere of good cheer.” To loan is now widely used in place of to lend in all tenses. Miss Mary Lispenard Ward, of Asheville, N. C., tells me that in Baltimore children coming to borrow books at the Enoch Pratt Free Library branches often say that they want to lend them.
7 Dr. Harold Wentworth sends me a clipping of an advertisement in the Morgantown (W. Va.) Post, Sept. 14, 1945, p. 7, sponsored by the local W.C.T.U. and containing the following: “Perhaps if one sits down and shuts his eyes and dreams he can make himself believe a glass of beer harmless when drank by the father in the home.” Wentworth comments: “The W.C.T.U. won’t use the word drunk even when it’s right.”
8 In Pure English of the Soil, S.P.E. Tract No. LXIV, 1945, p. 103, Sir William Craigie shows that drawed was listed as the preterite of to draw in The Modern Husbandman, by William Ellis; London, 1745, along with casted, growed, rended, rised and throwed.
9 Among American horse fanciers a jumping horse is called a lepper.
10 Mr. Robert A. Johnson, of Brooklyn, tells me that in the palmy days of the trolley car the past tense of to brake was broke in both active and passive voices, e.g., “That car broke all right yesterday,” “I broke her a little coming into the curve.”
11 In The Past Tense of to tread water, American Notes & Queries, Feb., 1946, pp. 168–69, H. B. Woolf shows that trod is historically supported, but that treaded seems to be supplanting it. In 1939 the Baltimore Evening Sun made a low bow to history with “Buffaloes … bothered the railroads by trodding the tracks in great herds.” On June 10 (editorial page) it poked fun at its own slip under the heading of New Words For Old.
12 Mr. R. P. Whitmer, of the American Foundry & Furnace Co., Bloomington, Ill., tells me that het is almost invariably used for heated by workmen in the heating industry.
1 The new verbs listed in Supplement I, pp. 382–406, belong mainly to rather pretentious levels of American speech, but there are always novelties on the popular level, e.g., to barbecue, to hitch-hike and laundried. The NED gives to launder as the verb form of the noun, and laundered as its perfect participle, but laundried seems to be preferred. See The Value of English Linguistics to the Teacher, by Louise Pound, American Speech, Nov., 1925, p. 102.
2 Concerning the American Language, in The Stolen White Elephant; Hartford, 1882, p. 269.
3 The NED traces it to c. 1340, but marks it “now rare except in illgotten.”
4 Gotten, American Speech, Sept., 1927, pp. 495–96. See also Get and Gotten, by Wallace Rice, American Speech, April, 1932, pp. 280–96.
5 In The Obsolescent Past Participle, Saturday Review of Literature, May 19, 1945, p. 15, Silas Bent quoted Bernard M. Allen, professor of Latin at Andover, as follows: “Some seventy-five or more years ago some American grammars began to talk against have got for possess or have. Got seemed superfluous. So grade teachers began to say, ‘Don’t say have got, say have. Don’t use the got.’ After a while it resulted in a subconscious avoidance of it in other uses, and going back to gotten.”
1 Private communication, Sept. 23, 1946.
2 In A Letter From Texas, American Speech, April, 1940, pp. 214–15, Wilmer R. Park reports that used to could is often reinforced, in that great State, by might could, might would, ought to could, may can and might can. He says that these forms are encountered “even among educated people who should, and frequently do, know better.”
1 The Speech of East Texas, before cited, p. 98.
2 The Dialect of Southeastern Missouri, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part V, 1903, p. 312.
3 Verb Plus to, American Speech, Dec., 1939, pp. 319–20.
1 Wyld, p. 166. The DAE’s first example is antedated, in the form of “I should of sent it before now,” in a letter of Stutley Medbury, a Yankee pedlar, dated Paducah, Ky., Dec. 26, 1841. It is printed in New Light on the Yankee Peddler, by Priscilla Carrington Kline, New England Quarterly, March, 1939, p. 90. A modern example from Ringside View of Elliott Roosevelt, by Henry J. Taylor, New York World-Telegram, Feb. 8, 1947, p. 2: “Mr. Roosevelt, in Mr. Lewis’ opinion, must not of known the meaning of the word interloper.” I am indebted here to Mr. Alexander Kadison.
2 Might of, by E. R. Wallace, June 5.
3 Of and Have, by J. W. Sowan, June 12. Mr. W. G. Sullivan, of Indianapolis, calls my attention to the fact that “He might of been run over” and “people who gave theirselves airs which they had no business to of done” are in Compton Mackenzie’s Youth’s Encounter; New York, 1915, pp. 28 and 62. This book was published in England as Sinister Street.
4 The Grammar of the Ozark Dialect, American Speech, Oct., 1927, p. 4.
5 Piccalillie on the Vernacular, Saturday Review of Literature, March 3, 1945, p. 22. S
ee also AL4, p. 444.
6 pp. 199–201 and 445.
7 p. 318.