In today's Times, a sentence in an article about the growing number of atheists, contains the following clause: "An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium. . . ."
Anybody else have a problem with "had showed"? How you answer that question may depend on how you feel about, say, the past tense of the verb "to dive": Dove? Dived? Either?
Languages are constantly changing, and they tend to move toward grammatical simplification. Just think about "thou." It's not an old-fashioned word for "you," not exactly, anyway. It's the equivalent of the Spanish, "tu," which is to say that it's the familiar form of the second-person pronoun. English used to make the distinction between familiar and formal, as other languages like Spanish and French still do. No longer, though. Now "you" can be one's best friend or someone one has just met. A bit of elegance lost, perhaps, but just the way languages work.
And verbs simplify as well. So irregular verbs tend to become more and more "regular" as time goes by. The past tense of "dive" was always "dove," but now, more and more, you see "dived." And if today's Times article is any indication, a similar transformation is underway for "show." In the past, one had shown someone something, but now, apparently, someone has showed something else. It doesn't yet sound right, but give it 20 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment