brung their wife along." Sez (=says), used as the preterite of to say, shows the same confusion. One observes it again in such forms as "then I goes up to him." Here the decay of number helps in what threatens to become a decay of tense. Examples of it are not hard to find. The average race-track follower of the humbler sort seldom says "I won $2," or even "I wan $2," but almost always "I win $2." And in the same way he says "I see him come in," not "I saw him" or "seen him." Charters' materials offers other specimens, among them "we help distributed the fruit," "she recognize, hug, and kiss him" and "her father ask her if she intended doing what he ask." Perhaps the occasional use of eat as the preterite of to eat, as in "I eat breakfast as soon as I got up," is an example of the same flattening out of distinctions. Lardner has many specimens, among them "if Weaver and them had not of begin kicking" and "they would of knock down the fence." I notice that used, in used to be, is almost always reduced to simple use, as in "it use to be the rule." One seldom, if ever, hears a clear d at the end. Here, of course, the elision of the d is due primarily to assimilation with the t of to a second example of one form of decay aiding another form. But the tenses apparently tend to crumble without help. I frequently hear whole narratives in a sort of debased present: "I says to him…. Then he ups and says…. I land him one on the ear…. He goes down and out, …" and so on.[1] Still under the spell of our disintegrating inflections, we are prone to regard the tense inflections of the verb as absolutely essential, but there are plenty of languages that get on without them, and even in our own language children and foreigners often reduce them to a few simple forms. Some time ago an Italian contractor said to me "I have go there often." Here one of our few surviving inflections was displaced by an analytical devise, and yet the man's meaning was quite clear, and it would be absurd to say that his sentence violated the inner spirit of English. That inner spirit, in fact, has inclined steadily toward "I have go" for a thousand years.
- ↑ Cf. Dialect Notes, vol. iii, pt. i, p. 59; ibid., vol. III, pt. iv, p. 283.
