Heather in Fairbanks, Alaska, asks why historians and documentary narrators sometimes describe past events in the present tense. This use of the historical present is a storytelling convention that creates immediacy. The historical present can be...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been busy writing sequels to famous novels inspired by changing the tense of verbs in their titles. For example, what might be his new iteration of a classic Gabriel García Márquez tale about two romantic youths who became...
Ronald in Columbia, South Carolina, hears some people pronounce the word help as if they’re saying hope. There’s a British dialectal version of the past tense of the verb help that is spelled holp or holpen or hope, which have hung on in...
Gail in San Diego County, California, has been hearing forms such as I could have went for I could have gone, a ship that had sunken where she expected sank, I was sat, and I was drugged for I was dragged. These don’t all have the same explanation...
To be forswunk means to be totally worn out from overwork. It’s from forswink, meaning to exhaust by labor. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Forswunk” I don’t know how I lived all these years without knowing...
Chris from Columbus, Wisconsin, wonders why English says bought rather than the regularized buyed for the past tense of buy. The form belongs to a small set of high-frequency verbs whose older patterns survived while many other verbs shifted toward...