Andy Rooney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s segment on \u00e2\u20ac\u015360 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sunday evening made a point that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s become increasingly obvious: Few people write letters the way they used to.<\/p>\n
Rooney drew the patent conclusion that with e-mail almost instantaneous and almost free, the Postal Service receives less revenue because fewer people mail that way.<\/p>\n
Of the 40-plus names on my e-mail address book, I know the street address of precious few of them. What about their phone numbers? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s even worse. Having cordless and cell phones that store 50 numbers, we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dial\u00e2\u20ac\u009d people anymore.<\/p>\n
The matter became increasingly apparent this week when I received calls from different recipients in different states who wondered whether my once-sharp spelling and grammar skills had taken a nosedive.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
In my letters, I used \u00e2\u20ac\u0153remound\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153arrove\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as the past tense of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153remind\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153arrive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Naturally, my friends assumed I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lost it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as one of them said. For years, in correspondence with friends, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken liberties with what we call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153irregular verbs,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d those with a past tense that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t follow the rule of adding \u00e2\u20ac\u0153-ed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to verbs. And the shunning of traditional spelling rules comes about because a letter \u00e2\u20ac\u201d an actual hard copy \u00e2\u20ac\u201d allows me to check it, as I spell things exactly as I wish, for effect. The blogosphere gives us little time to think things out.<\/p>\n
But why would anybody wish to become rebellious about language? For starters, when I taught, I dealt with rebellious users of the language, those who refused to follow the several hundred self-contradictory rules about English. As a seventh-grader at Immaculate Conception School, I asked language questions of Sister Mary Rigoureux, who must have thought (with some justification) that I was more interested in my question than her answer and that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d won if the question or her answer drew a laugh.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was a voice crying in the wilderness, a request for attention. But many of us found it strange that comparable linguistic inquisitions from some kids from Las Vegas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 more affluent neighborhoods usually prompted Sister\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s declarations that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why now that you mention it, Dearie, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brilliant. How perceptive of you!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
I realized how quickly my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cuteness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had worn thin as I spent after-school eternities leaning out the window and clapping erasers together.<\/p>\n
But back to regular and irregular verbs. To test the theory, I located a list of hundreds of irregular verbs. For example, the words \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bleed,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153forbid,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153forget,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153deal,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hang,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mistake,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stand\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153think\u00e2\u20ac\u009d require a different kind of spelling or an inflectional ending when we use them in the past tense. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153he standed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153she thinked.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d No, the rules are different for these irregular verbs.<\/p>\n
So, as I suggested in a column a few years back, why not make all regular verbs irregular? That way we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to stop and think.<\/p>\n
When I arrove at this topic, I remound you of struggles foreigners must have trying to learn the rules. But once learned, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re easy to follow. Remember that most of what we call verb errors are actually an application by analogy. If the past tense of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153show\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153showed,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can we then use \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throwed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? So, people often say things like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153growed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bited.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And notice that many of the most common verbs are irregular, words like go, do, see, feed, think, eat, run and throw. Once we get the rhythm of the irregularizing of regular verbs, reading is easy.<\/p>\n
Here goes:<\/p>\n
Monday evening, a female coworker called frantically, saying she needed a short-term loan. It appears that she froke out (break, broke\/ freak, froke) as she pought (seek, sought; peek, pought) at online clothing outlets and needed to feed her bank account before the next day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s accounting.<\/p>\n
She said she fit (light, lit \/ fight, fit) the urge to splurge, but soon her conservative tendency bote (write, wrote\/ bite, bote) the dust and she grun madly as she sought to find clothes which maught (catch, caught …) her goal for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a new look.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She felt she ned (feed, fed …) a new look for the upcoming holiday bash as she glid down the aisle; how else could she capture everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention and be a big hit?<\/p>\n
So, she explained, she leant (mean, meant) into the task, and as it snew heavily outdoors, she had no unexpected visitors and no interruptions. That made her glad it had snown.<\/p>\n
Voila! Her wardrobe throve! She lood (stand, stood) great outfits and never wank at the price tags. Bereft of all shame, she mused, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is great. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never really lave (give, gave …) like this before!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She pelt (feel, felt) out her bankroll and credit card and son (win, won) shamelessly, overspending her budget. Indeed she plew the part of a bigshot.<\/p>\n
Poor thing. Who will bail her out this time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Andy Rooney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s segment on \u00e2\u20ac\u015360 Minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sunday evening made a point that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s become increasingly obvious: Few people write letters the way they used to. Rooney drew the patent conclusion that with e-mail almost instantaneous and almost free, the Postal Service receives less revenue because fewer people mail that way. Of the 40-plus names on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}