People on TV can't conjugate verbs anymore.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

I seen, I done.

Helper verbs are WAY over their heads. "I have seen" --woah that's too difficult.

People on TV think all verbs add an -ed at the end. They don't know about verbs that change in the middle.

The other night I heard "shined" when they should have said "shone".

Nobody knows about the past perfect tense! I'm no English major but I was awake in school.

They read repetitive scripts on the TV news. I heard them say they "found a little boy hidden in hiding".

:banghead:

[raccoon]

1. I've noticed too, people that don't seem to know the correct form of verbs.

Can't think of a specific example, though.

[SheilaT]

2. It's not just people on TV.

It's everywhere. English grammar simply isn't being taught in the schools, and hasn't been taught as far as I can tell, for some time now.

About twenty or so years ago I asked my sister why she didn't correct her children's misuse of verb forms and so on, and she airily explained that they'd pick up the correct forms just by hearing them from here. Guess what. They didn't

I'm also driven totally crazy by the misuse of personal pronouns -- I when me is correct, he when him would be correct, and so on.

Also lie and lay. I drilled those into my two sons and they may be the only ones in their generation who actually use them correctly.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. You do know the goal of an English teacher in Texas, don't you?

I'm a native Texan so I can tell this one.

"The purpose of an English teacher in Texas is to teach the student to write a simple declarative sentence without the word 'bullshit' in it."


:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Odin2005]

4. Even educated people like myself fail to recogize our own dialectisms.

My favorite example is that I just recently discovered that I, along with a lot of working class people in the upper Midwest, stick spurious -en endings on irregular past participles in analogy with "gotten": caughten, boughten, taughten, soughten, putten, cutten, etc. I'm an educated person who had the formal standard drilled into me and it hardly affected my normal speech at all.

Oh, and all the Grammar Nazis that get after me for saying "he ran fast" can go screw themselves.