In our mountains of Western North Carolina once common plants, animals and folk ways are passing away. People notice and resist. Some hug trees. Others release red wolves into the national forests. A Swannanoa Valley college burns out non-native plants to protect native flora. Ever fewer mountain men speak like the 1640s political rhyme which their freedom-demanding ancestors brought with them. 

“When Adam delved and Eva span
Where was then the Gentleman?”

Regular or Weak Verbs

We all memorized the same rules of English grammar and syntax. We learned that well beyond 99.9% of verbs are regular and utterly predictable in forming their past and past perfect tense forms. In almost all cases, when Pablo, a non-native speaker of English, hears Edwina, a native speaker, say  “CORRECT me if I’m wrong,” Pablo guesses aright when he decides that the verb form CORRECT in other contexts will appear as “I never CORRECT my friends,” “yesterday Edwina  CORRECTED my pronunciation” and “throughout our friendship Edwina HAS always CORRECTED my mistakes.” Most  English verbs, that is, resemble CORRECT. Their other two principal parts are predictable once you know their present. Follow-followed-have followed. Sprint-sprinted-have sprinted. Achieve-achieved-have achieved. We call such verbs regular or weak.

But a few verbs are irregular, “strong” or have gradations or “ablauts” (vowel/pronunciation changes) in their past tenses. Such verbs are said to have “strong” past and past perfect forms. Regarding these, Pablo often errs.  When he hears Edwina say, “Now SEE here, Pablo!”  he is wrong to infer that he can say, “I SEED a parrot yesterday” or “Edwina has not yet SEED that video.” No, some verbs are irregular or strong.  Normal rules do not hold. You have to take strong verbs as they are and learn them one by one: 

• see-saw-have seen, 
• spin-spun (or the older span)-have spun, 
• lie-lay-have lain, 

and a few score others.

Problems begin with verbs which display both regular and irregular forms.  I tend to opt for the strong forms. Yet weak forms are driving out the strong at flank speed. DIVE’s past tense can be either DOVE or DIVED. HANG appears as both HANGED and HUNG. LEAN’s past is either LEANED or LEANT.  DREAM appears as either DREAMT (Strong/Ablaut) or DREAMED (weak/regular). While I still hear LEANT and DREAMT and DOVE and SLID and LEAPT and TROD, sadly  I find them less and less often in print. Strong verbs do live but are endangered, especially in popular writing,  such as novels and newspapers.

You  and I were taught, no doubt, that LAY is both “weak” and a transitive verb. It should not, therefore, appear without an object. The hen LAYS an egg. She LAID an egg yesterday. In the past month she has LAID 26 eggs. We learned that LIE (in the spatial  meaning, not related to truth-telling) is an intransitive verb. That is, it never takes an object. The cubs LIE by their mother. Yesterday they LAY by each other. For most of their lives they have LAIN beside their mother. Nowadays, however, in popular print LAY is both transitive and intransitive and is driving LIE out of our mountains.

It helps the young to learn even a little Latin. They learn to  avoid spelling mistakes such as MINISCULE for MINUSCULE. Knowing how third conjugation verbs in Latin variously deploy themselves empowers teens confidently to predict that CREDIBLE has to be right and CREDABLE must be misspelled in English. 

If you are passionate about saving endangered giant sequoias, lynxes or red wolves, then you should also love strong verb forms. Even old or outlandish ones. Are you brave enough to admire legendary pitcher Dizzy Dean’s fondness for bizarre forms? Consider, “finally that runner SLUD into third base.” Don’t you wince when you read in newspapers forms like SWEARED steadily replacing SWORE or LIGHTED doing the same to LIT? Are you willing to keep the world safe for SNUCK as well as SNEAKED?

If “she LAID down  to sleep” is now spoken all about us, can “She FINDED her voice” be far behind?  Friends, it is happening. Strong verbs are the white rhinos and the Bengal tigers of American English. We who love vowel changes and strong forms should, therefore, rouse ourselves to use them often and forcefully in our speech and writing. We must also sound the alarm before WROUGHT (as poetic perfect form of WORK) along with WRUNG and STROVE and WOKEN live only in moldering dictionaries.

Speaking of dictionaries: there be both wisdom and pain in the making thereof. Dr. Samuel Johnson issued in 1755 A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. On the one hand, he opined: 

“Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggle for our language.” 

Fair enough. But rear guard and delaying actions in a losing cause can be glorious, as when Basque tribesman SLEW (not SLAYED) Roland while he BROUGHT (not BRINGED) up the rear of Charlemagne’s retreating host in the Pyrenees pass of Roncesvalles. If strong verbs must disappear, then let their passing at least be skillfully contested. May their demise be ever in doubt. May their fading be as the setting sun’s: rippling  with astonishing hues, causing us to catch our breath, something grand to be lamented in their passage. For strong verbs are not merely strong or irregular. They are also bearers of emotion. Their departure deserves to be long and dignified. With Huxley we may rejoice that “after many a summer dies the swan.” Imitating Theodore Roosevelt when he failed in 1912 to regain the presidency, defenders of strong verb forms, too, are certain that “we stand at Armageddon and do battle for the Lord.”

Might I not then be granted  similar license in 1999 on behalf of WOVE, LAIN, BODE  and other threatened strong verb friends within our ever changing English language?

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE