“To Cast” Past Tense: Cast or Casted?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelly from Greensburg, PA.

Hey, Kelly, welcome.

Hi, welcome to the show.

Well, I’m calling because I’m a professor at Seton Hill University, and every now and then I have, I’d say, a student a year who presents me with the sentence,

I was casted in this show, and I’ve even had faculty members say, well, when this is casted.

And in my recollection, the only word is cast.

You can be cast in a show.

You can be cast in a role.

Obviously, I work in the theater.

I teach theater history, and I direct here.

So at first I thought it was just some strange anomaly.

But then it seems to be pretty consistent, where every year I have one or two students

Who sort of present this to me like they’ve been writing this word all their lives,

And I don’t understand it.

And do you talk with them about it?

I don’t.

I just, you know, I just kind of mark the word as cast on the paper and hope that it doesn’t come back.

Yeah.

That’s interesting.

I love that you, when you first, after you noticed it a couple times, just started kind of gathering the info.

And instead of condemning it, you’re now, like, curious to know whether or not there’s a larger story.

That’s what you’re asking, right?

Yes, I am.

Have I misunderstood the use of, is there a word that is casted, and are they using it correctly, and I’m just wrong?

That’s great. Bravo for that.

That is the right response when you encounter something that you think is wrong, but you keep seeing it, so then you second-guess yourself.

I’m taking a deep breath because usually on this show I’m the guy who’s willing to allow a lot of variants and exceptions

And allow dialects to creep into regular mainstream English and so on and so forth.

And this is one of those cases where there are a large number of people who say casted as the past and the past participle of the verb to cast.

There are a lot of them.

However, by far and away, there is, as far as I know, no standard dictionary or usage guide in North America that allows casted as the past and past participle.

And when you look across the whole spectrum of people who are right-casted, you tend to find that there are people who are on their way to a career or haven’t quite made it yet.

And I’m trying to be polite about this, but people who are not at the pinnacle of whatever field they’re in, let’s always say.

But the people who have the educations and the experience and the leadership, those are the people who tend to right-cast.

And that is a really great model to follow.

So what I’m saying is, in short words, is cast is by far and away the best choice here.

Casted has existed as an option for hundreds of years, but it’s not the good choice because you’re going to run up against resistance if you use it.

Yeah, you’re going to run up against people like me who think it just sounds weird.

It’s the same thing as, you know, we broadcasted the answer yesterday.

It’s kind of compounded by the weirdness of English where you do have some words that are similar like forecasted.

Forecasted is a permitted word for the past and past participle of to forecast.

We have podcast, for example.

Podcast and the past participle are podcasted and not podcast as past participle.

So we have some examples of similar words that show even more confusion in this.

But you should say, I cast him in the role and he was excellent, not I casted him in the role and he was excellent.

Okay. And now that you point out the distinction between professional and academic, I will say that I never, ever encountered casted when I worked in the professional theater. I never saw anybody use that in writing. And so when I came across it in a school setting, I thought, what’s happening? What’s happening? Have I missed something?

Well, you’re in one of the, shall we call this, the recovery rooms of people who’ve learned something incorrectly.

Like they are still on their way to the ultimate perfect knowledge that they will surely achieve by the time they die, right?

They’re learning from you, and you’re one of the people who’s teaching them.

So you have a great opportunity to intercept these people so they can go on to become the people who use cast and not cast it.

I will do so.

Yeah, so keep marking those papers.

Yeah, I would keep marking it.

Again, casted is informally.

I mean, I would never accost somebody if they just sent an informal email to me that said casted.

But if I were editing a text that was going to be published or presented to the world,

I would definitely use cast as the past and the past participle of to cast.

Okay.

Great.

Thank you so very much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Kelly.

Really appreciate it.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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