Did You See What You Saw?

Once again I find it necessary to teach you something you should have learned in elementary school! When you should have been conjugating verbs, you were busy making cootie catchers. Your poor teacher did her best, but you were watching the clock trying to figure out how long it was until recess.

Now here you are, a grown adult, going around talking like you've never been to school in your life. Interestingly enough, this seems to be a problem in speaking but not in writing. At least I can't think of a time when I've seen the problem. Mostly it's a problem you hear.

Let's start with a pop quiz. Fill in the blank with "saw" or "seen." Answers at the end of the post.
1. I ______ you at the store yesterday.
2. I have ______ that movie three times.
3. That old car has ______ better days.
4. You should have ______ Michael trying to get that pretty girl's attention.
5. She ______ him, but she had her nose so high she could have drowned in a rainstorm. (This saying brought to you by My Hillbilly.)

Source

Okay, let's start with the basics. Verbs show action. You knew that much, right? Good. The verb tense tells when the action occurred: past, present, or future.Verbs take on different forms to show different tenses. Listing those different forms is called conjugating the verb. Here's the abbreviated version:

Present Tense                    Past Tense                        Future Tense

I walk                                   I walked                           I will walk    
You walk                             You walked                      You will walk
He walks                              He walked                       He will walk

Everybody's walking!

There are three more tenses you might have forgotten about. Your high school English teacher taught you these, but there was this cutie sitting next to you, and you were worried about how your hair looked, so you couldn't be expected to actually learn grammar. (I'm rolling my eyes here, you know.)

These are the perfect tenses. They are the forms we use with the helping verbs, have, has, or had:

Present Perfect                 Past Perfect                         Future Perfect

I have walked                    I had walked                             I will have walked
You have walked               You had walked                     You will have walked
He has walked                  He had walked               He will have walked

So far so good, right? Walk is a regular verb, and regular verbs are easy. You just add -ed to the end to get the past tense or the perfect tenses. Simple.

The problem comes along when we get to the irregular verbs. Irregular verbs just give you fits because they don't follow any rules.  They seem to form the past tense and perfect tenses any ol' way they want to. Nevertheless, each irregular verb does have a correct past tense and past participle. (The past participle is what we call the form we use in the perfect tenses.)

So  now we finally get to saw and seen. We start with the verb "to see." Saw is the past tense, and seen is the past participle. We use saw by itself. We use seen with the helping verbs have, has, or had. We never use "seen" without a helping verb!  Let's conjugate the verb "to see."

Present Tense                    Past Tense                        Future Tense
I see                                     I saw                               I will see
You see                              You saw                            You will see
He sees                              He saw                              He will see


Present Perfect                 Past Perfect                         Future Perfect
I have seen                         I had seen                             I will have seen
You have seen                    You had seen                        You will have seen
He has seen                        He had seen                 He will have seen

So what does all this mean? It means you have to quit going around saying things like, "I seen Margie yesterday"!  It is incorrect to say, "Have you saw that three-legged dog running around here?" You are doing it exactly backward, and you must stop! You're giving me a headache!!

Here are some more irregular verbs:

Present Tense	Past Tense	Past Participle Use with have/has/had
arise	arose	arisen
awake	awoke	awoken
(be) is, am, are	was, were	been
become	became	become
begin	began	begun
blow	blew	blown
break	broke	broken
bring	brought	brought

Alrighty, let's correct that pop quiz.


1. I saw you at the store yesterday.
2. I have seen that movie three times.
3. That old car has seen better days.
4. You should have seen Michael trying to get that pretty girl's attention.
5. She saw him, but she had her nose so high she could have drowned in a rainstorm.
 How did you do? I'm sure you did very well, because my readers are the very smartest readers around. You know I was really writing to all those other people. The ones who don't.....ummm..... wait.  If they don't read this, how will we fix them?

Okay. Go out there and get your friends to read this! The ones who need it. You know who they are. In the meantime, leave a comment. Was this easy to understand? Do I need to explain anything more clearly? And what should I tackle next? We all know there's a lot of grammar out there that needs fixin'!


          

What's Bugging the Hillbilly?

 Speaking of hillbillies, and we were, here's a post from My Hillbilly. I love him, but he's been known to tell a fish tale on occasion. You'll know it when you read it:


In my post today, I want to talk about critters (animals, insects, and such) we have around our houses.  Having grown up on a 40 acre farm in an old farm house that was surrounded by a barn, old chicken house, feed storage shed, and other miscellaneous outbuildings, we had our share of critters.
 

The Old Meents Home

Surprisingly, being an old farm house, mice weren’t as bad as one might think.  That could have something to do with us constantly having cats that roamed around us.  Spiders were a different thing.  We always had tons of them.  I wasn’t particularly afraid of them, but at night, being awakened by one that was large enough that you felt it walking across your chest, had a tendency to create instant adrenalin and frantic action.  This probably had some good medicinal effects – for instance if your blood pressure was too low, it would raise it.  It probably was good to improve bowel movements, mmm- probably not so good for incontinence!

Roaches were something with which we occasionally had a problem but it never seemed to amount to much.  However, there was a house at which, every time I went and visited, a couple of roaches would crawl on me.  I don’t know if they were greeting me or letting me know that it was their house and that if I didn’t get out, that they were going to call their enforcer, Butch, to throw me out.  I actually think the roaches were so bad there, that the mice and other critters had left.  I don’t know if they thought the neighborhood had gone to pot, or if possibly Butch had already thrown them out.  The family that owned the house finally got rid of them by using Spectracide at double strength.  I suspect that someone else got roaches shortly thereafter.  You kill very few.  They just suddenly feel unwanted and move to the next closest house! 

Fleas are just nasty!  We never had them in our farm house.  We had too many cats and dogs on which to live.  However, when my children were growing up, one of our indoor/outdoor cats got sick and immediately, the fleas left the cat and got into my house.  I got rid of them with a few pans of soapy water.  I would put a light over the pans at night.  It would take about 2 to 3 weeks to get rid of them all. The fleas would jump at the lights and fall into the soapy water, and they drowned.  It was so exhilarating to see their little bodies floating in the water!  Ya-Ha-Ha!  It was even more exhilarating when eventually you quit finding any of their little bodies.  

Unfortunately, in looking at real estate, I have been in houses where the minute you walked in, hundreds of the little critters jumped on you and began biting.  I and whoever was with me on these occasions, would look like we were crazy as we went running out while trying to slap them off.  Yuck!  You immediately felt dirty, like getting naked, (not for the right reasons), throwing your clothes away or at least into the washing machine, and taking a shower!  Ooh!  I hate fleas! 

Maybe The Hillbilly should have put the fleas in clothing!  Source: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Ants are something by which we have all been affected.  Every house in which I have ever lived, at one time or another, has had an invasion of some type of ants.  My first home when I married in 1975 was a mobile home.  Yes, if you want to call me trailer trash, that’s okay!  The trailer was a 2 bedroom, 1 bath with washer and dryer, eat-in kitchen and a very warm, homey living room.  It came with a front porch, a small back porch, some furniture, central heat and air and I had almost a ½ acre lot. 

 At any rate, my mom told me that after I cleaned it all up, I should burn some sulfur candles in it to kill any insects, critters, and germs.  I did!  The instructions said to close it up and not enter it for about 3 days and even then to air it out.  I looked through the windows sometime after I lit the candles and couldn’t even see inside.  For the first year, insects would not even come in the door, I don’t know what it was doing for us, but boy were we bugless --- except for ants!  However I used some powder from some mail order group my mom suggested and they died quickly!  

We once had a really strange night in this mobile home.  My parents' dog, which decided to sleep at our mobile home, was just super upset and kept barking.  We kept smelling coffee as if someone was in our kitchen brewing it.  We were somewhat spooked, in fact, we kept getting up and looking around inside and outside.  Then later, I heard a really strange sound of something on our window screen.  I pulled back the shade and there was a bat just kind of bounce climbing up the screen.  

Of course it got more weird when it pulled out a note that said, "Invite me in"!

 I'm not stupid; I've watched enough vampire movies to know better than that! So I told it, (I don’t know if it was male or female), "You don’t even want to come in here.  You look like a mouse with wings.  Trust me on this; if there is anything that looks like a mouse in this house, my wife will take a shoe, chase it down and beat it bloody!  You don’t even want to come in here!"

Squirrels, rats, and packrats are critters you don’t want in your house.  A friend of mine got flying squirrels in his attic.  They were chewing up everything!  Rats and packrats are just nasty.  For one thing, their poop is about the size of a small dog’s.  They also chew up things.  We once had a nice Indian woven rug, that a rat almost ate up!  Packrats will carry off money, jewelry, and other things.  A friend of mine that was living in a nice looking old farm house, when a packrat carried off his wife's wedding ring.  Not Cool!  Another friend of mine said that he knew that he was in trouble when he found a loaf of bread that had been dragged across the house!  

I was living in a duplex that had some kind of rat.  I put out traps and would find them empty and across the room from where I left them.  My son got a look at the rat and told me that I needed a much larger trap.  He said you are just making this thing mad with what you are using!  So I got a much larger trap.  However, I really knew that I was in trouble when I found the trap broken in half with a little note pinned to it with a little knife, challenging me to a duel ---- dueling banjoes.  I mean, I don’t know how to play banjo!

From the Hillbilly’s Corner

The Hillbilly is basically an honest man and wants to come clean about a couple things:
Things that are untrue --- the bat did not pull out a note, but it's true that I didn’t look to see if it was male or female, I mean that just seems perverted!  And my wife would have beat it bloody with a shoe!  

And no, the large trap was not broken and it didn’t have a note pinned to it with a little knife.  

But it is true that I don’t play the banjo!

That's My Hillbilly, y'all, a mighty hunter! I'm still trying to figure out what the bat at the window had to do with the smell of coffee brewing. If I can get a bat to have my coffee ready for me every morning, he'd be more than welcome! Maybe he has friend who vacuums too! 

I once lived in a house that had roaches. They moved into the Roach Motel and they were gone! Great product! What kinds of pests have you had to deal with? How did you dispatch them? And what do YOU think the bat had to do with the smell of coffee brewing?

You Say Sofa; I Say Couch

I got this question on the Ask the English Teacher page, and I'm sharing it here. Do with it what you will. 

Here is the question as it was written:

What is your opinion, is Appalachian English nothing more than inferior dialect of uneducated lazy Southern Hillbillies living among themselves isolated from the real world? Or is it as research expanding over 80 years now theorize as remnant of Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) English that due to isolation has been preserved? There is other theories from the British Isles settlers to adapting with Colonial American English. Personally my opinion the so call educated people are not willing to acknowledge years of stereotyping from being unable to speak or understand it. Where as speakers of Appalachian English have no trouble understanding standard English as well.

Love to hear your prospective on the subject, from my quick overview you have experience with standard English, to being married to an Hillbilly, to teaching and that's the upmost authority any could have.

If you have not noticed I am an true Appalachian Hillbilly, over the years one can only imagine the theoretical I have experienced. As an example two have stayed implanted among my old head. After moving to New York City in 2000 was asked by who now is an dear friend, "Don't you people do things with barn animals why?" Took a few minutes to reply then said well I was hoping that our delightful habits were not known but maybe one day I'll take you down there so to experience it. Left it at that for a couple years. Then while on an four week Caribbean cruse was approached by a wonderful educated well rounded lady from Chicago, she wanted to know why and how it was that I am not those on Hee Haw? She and her colleagues for years could not understand how no one would help us, educate us, send us to boarding schools for such types. Cruse already half way she had become part of our afternoon martini tea time group but, just could not let this pass. Came back well honey you know what I am glad you're so good to see that in me if you would like to donate I am not ashamed to accept an Harvard education as well as summer abroad the european expanding my little pea picking brain. LOL Got neither but she did get educated.

In closing am in debate for now ten years that I am no more than just an Hillbilly reason I can speak better is association among the educated, any so called theories Appalachian English is superior I should really go to be mentally checked, jokingly of course.


In answer to the question, I don't find any one dialect inherently inferior to any other. Dialects tend to be based on regional or socio-economic isolation. In other words, we use the speech we hear around us all day. 

Also, language is constantly changing. If we take a group who all speak the same dialect and separate them for long enough, they will eventually be speaking two completely different dialects.

However, there is a dialect known as Standard American English. This is the English used in business and education. It is the language of power. In order to be successful in America, one should be able to use Standard American English. Without this ability, one is unlikely to be taken seriously by those who have power and authority. These are the people who will hire you, support you, connect you, bankroll you. Or not.

The Wicked English Teacher only corrects the grammar, punctuation, and spelling of people who are writing in a venue in which Standard American English is expected. 

So there you have it. What's your opinion on the question of whether one dialect is "superior" or "inferior"? By the way, MY Hillbilly has a very good grasp on Standard American English.