07 August 2007

Rage Against the Past-Tense Droppers!

I don't know what it is. Perhaps some people are deaf. Perhaps some people don't pay attention to anything when they read. Perhaps some people have keyboards that don't have Ds on them. All I know is, these people are driving me nuts! They're showing up everywhere.

What's with sentences like this? "My washing machine needs to be repair."

And this? "I jump over a bird after it got kill yesterday."

HELLO! The first time I noticed this phenomenon, it was in written form only. Every email, memo, essay, etc. that a girl at work turned in, she forgot any past tense -Ds or -EDs. It bugged me so much that I started listening when she spoke, and found that she didn't pronounce them either. Now it makes sense if you don't pronounce something correctly to spell it incorrectly, but something so basic to English? And someone so not-foreign? I know she's not deaf. I know she's not stupid. If she can learn that the past tense of "drive" is "drove," why can't she learn that the past tense of "repair" is "repaired"? Then I started noticing the same mistake in other places, such as blogs, and Craigslist. Der!

Okay, people, start studying English and don't, for heaven's sake, try to teach anyone English until you know it!

1 comment:

  1. Oh, Michelle, you are destined for a life a bitterness and offending lots of people if you continue to insist on prescriptive grammar. Constantly being aggravated by and pointing out other people's faults is no way to live.

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