“Hitten” Every Green Light

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kendall Thurman from Highland, Utah. How are you?

Hey, doing well, Kendall. How are you? And what’s on your mind today?

I’m from Texas, and I don’t really have an accent. I kind of lost it, but there are some things that I use, like y’all. And my wife is from British Columbia, Canada. And we’ve had kind of a mild, like, melting pot of our languages. Like, she says y’all now. We’ve been married 27 years. And I say, I say, a, sometimes it’s just more effective.

We were driving the other day and I think I crossed an invisible line. She was driving and it was one of those really nice drives where every green light, no red lights. And I said, man, this is awesome. You’ve hit an evergreen light. And she goes, excuse me? No. She says, did you just say hitting? And I said, yeah, you’ve hit nevergreen light. It’s awesome. And she’s like, no. She’s like, that does not apply. You cannot say that. And she said, you have never said that in our 27 years. I said, well, sure. Yeah, I have. That just makes sense. You’ve hit nevergreen light. I knew in my heart of hearts I was wrong. And the Internet confirmed it. But it’s just one of those things, I think, when you grow up with it, it just feels so natural. You’ve hidden.

And then there’s words like got, like, oh, you’ve gotten or whatever, bit and bitten. So H-I-T-T-E-N. And it’s, you know, as I spell it, I know it’s wrong. But it just comes out so naturally.

Vandal, I think you’re giving up too quickly. Yeah, hang in there. Oh, please. This would be awesome if I could tell her I’ve been confirmed. I mean, you’ve heard the show. We support the underdog all the time. All right. So let’s talk about Hitten.

Here’s the thing. The Internet is like that old line about elves from the Tolkien books. They will tell you both yes and no. The Internet can support anything. You can always find evidence for and against anything on the Internet. And so if you look deeply enough, you will find Charles McKay’s Dictionary of Lowland Scotch from 1888. And it will show you that hitting, H-I-T-T-N, does mean to strike or to touch violently with a blow. It’s the preterite and past participle of to hit. But it says obsolete.

Yes, okay, that’s it. Don’t say anything else. That’s it. No more information. Okay, we can stop here. But listen, it says it survives in the colloquial language of the peasantry. Now, I don’t think McKay means peasantry as a put-down because he also says the same thing in his book called The Lost Beauties of the English Language from 1874. So he calls it a lost beauty of the English language. How about that?

Yes, yes. That’s what I needed. And my wife’s going to, she’s going to, I do call her the queen of Venkos. Oh, that’s lovely. And so now she’s going to call me her peasant. You’re going to bow and scrape. If you’re not already, you should already. But what’s happening here is that Hitton, H-I-T-T-N, is kind of over extrapolated from the other past participle from other words. And you mentioned one, bitten. And there’s written and driven. Have all these other EN forms which exist. And so it’s kind of accidentally logical that hit might become hit and just like bit becomes bitten. You know, it just kind of makes some sense there.

So, Kendall, if you are eating those ketchup chips that you bought at the store, are they store-boughten? Huh. They’re store-boughten. Store-boughten. Yeah, because some people will say that. Yeah. You know, store-bought sounds kind of clunky to me to say store-bought. I would probably say, yeah, store-bought. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve used that phrase before. And were those potatoes groaned or grown? Grown. Grown. And if you didn’t like them, did you throw them out or were they throwed out? I might say throwed out just as if I’m just kind of being playful, you know?

Yeah, I see. There we go. So someone would do this. I’m fixing to throw these out. And did you squeeze out the condiments or were the condiments squoze out? I can’t say squoze. That doesn’t work. And were you caught or were you catched with a D? Yeah. See, those are all, it’s all comfort words. Yeah, see? They’re familiar. And all of these are irregular past participle forms, past and past participle forms. And so the problem is, is that we have these irregular, we have these weak and strong verbs, and we have regular and irregular verbs, and never the twain shall meet except they do, because humans like to over-extrapolate.

That is, we over-apply rules in places that we should not apply the rules, and sometimes we do it as a joke, and sometimes we do it accidentally, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I just can’t wait to tell the queen about this linguistic gem. What was the word again? Forgotten gem. Yeah, yeah, here it is. The book is called The Lost Beauties of the English Language, and the author is Charles McKay. That’s M-A-C-K-A-Y. The book is 1874, and it says, Hitton survives in the colloquial language of the peasantry.

Oh, I love it. I love it. Yes. All right, Kendall. We’ll give her our best wishes. Yeah. Hail to the queen. Yes. Yes. We will attend upon her at our next meeting. Yes. Thank you. Look forward to it. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye-bye.

Well, tell us about the melting pot of language in your household. 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.