Kathy Underwood
Which of the following usages are correct according to Edited American English? (Answers are at the end of this article.)
1a The company forecasted a 20% increase in earnings for the fiscal year.
1b The company forecast a 20% increase in earnings for the fiscal year.
2a Last night, meteorologist Greg Fishel forecasted a major storm for this weekend.
2b Last night, meteorologist Greg Fishel forecast a major storm for this weekend.
3a The show was broadcasted from Rockefeller Center.
3b The show was broadcast from Rockefeller Center.
4a The actor’s costume fitted the role.
4b The actor’s costume fit the role.
5a If those shoes had been properly fitted, you wouldn’t have blisters.
5b If those shoes had been properly fit, you wouldn’t have blisters.
Now, for your essay question, explain why we say slay-slew-slain, but we don’t say stay–stew–stain (versus stay–stayed–stayed). For the answer, read on.
As linguistic historians tell us, irregular verbs in English have been thinning out over the past thousand years. Some few irregular verbs (200 in American English per Bryan Garner; 68 per Elly van Gelderen) persist in our era. As reported by Baugh and Cable (in A History of the English Language), “the number of new strong formations has been negligible.” But when a new formation does arise, expect trouble.
The conjugation of cast has been stable for a millennium; it’s always been cast–cast–cast. Therefore, the same should be true of forecast (and broadcast, etc.). Per Garner, forecasted is “poor usage” and, on his Language-Change Index
, at Stage 1 (a new or dialect form that’s used by “a small minority of the language community”). Interestingly, one of Garner’s examples of this poor usage is from Fortune. So you can see how that usage could seep into the statistical world.
In fact, the Grammarist reports that “the ratio of the past-tense and participial forecast to forecasted in 21st-century newswriting is about 20 to one, and it’s five to one in books (where forecasted is disproportionately common in financial writing) and two to one in scientific and scholarly writing.” So those of us who work in financial, technical, and scientific domains, have to make a tough choice—go with the usage common to our discourse communities or go with the dominant usage in American English.
And there’s more. Until the 20th century, the word fit was conjugated as a regular verb: fit–fitted–fitted. Somehow in the course of the 20th century, fit started being conjugated as an irregular verb: fit–fit–fit. Bryan Garner refers to the new, now irregular conjugation as a “casualism.” But he still ranks it at Stage 5 on his Language-Change Index—at least in American English (this is not the case in British English). That is, he considers the term “fully accepted.”
According to Garner, there is one exception to the new conjugation of fit. That is, “where the fit is a physical coupling, fitted is the natural choice.” But what about the use of fitted when the references are to statistical fit? At the company where I work, fitted is common in our corpus. Here are some examples that I think are representative:
- “selecting fitted severity distributions”
- “a fitted lognormal distribution”
- “In the previous section, gamma distributions were fitted to all cells.”
To form the past tense and past participle, regular verbs (called “weak verbs” by linguists) usually add to the base verb form what’s called the “dental suffix” (the endings –ed, -d, or –t). Irregular (strong) verbs usually don’t rely on the dental suffix to form the past tense and past participle. Instead, most irregular verbs form their past tense and past participle by altering a vowel in the present tense form.
This type of vowel change is called an ablaut—not to be confused with an umlaut. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ablaut as “The morphological variation of a root vowel in Germanic and other Indo-European languages.” In other words, it’s a sound change. (The umlaut, on the other hand, is a specific type of sound change that has to do with the influence of a succeeding vowel.)
Then where do the sound shifts come from? Sound changes in language are an effect of the social surround—people talking to people in a given social surround with given conditions. The resulting vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and pronunciations are those of the dominant culture—in whatever form that dominance might take. (For example, the Normans won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and French became the status language for the ambitious. But in the 14th century, Chaucer won the battle for the All-England, best non-French poet, influencer of the common tongue, and general smarty-trousers. Then it seemed much smarter and cleverer to speak in the hybrid Anglo-Saxon-only-slightly-French vernacular.)
Old English (extant from the 5th through the 11th century) is considered a Germanic language, with bits of Celtic, Norse, and Latin thrown in. So if we consider the changes in the social surround from the 5th century on, we readily see why sound changes were rampant. From the end of the Roman era (around 410 CE) till 1066, Britain was repeatedly invaded by the Saxons, the Vikings, the Danes, and the Normans. So naturally the invaders and the invaded took some time to sort themselves out, reorganize, cope with the plague, wait for Chaucer to validate the vernacular, wait for the Great Vowel Shift to begin, and finally get on with building civilization.
Old English retained both a singular form and a plural form for the past tense of verbs. As the Germanic verb forms of Old English morphed into the verb forms of Middle English and Renaissance English, the plural form of the past tense slipped away. (Old English past participles also had the ge– prefix that is still found in contemporary German past participles.)
In contemporary English, past participles of strong verbs usually reflect the vowel that’s used in the plural form of the past tense in Old English. Here is an example from Baugh and Cable’s The History of the English Language:
| Present | Past (Singular) | Past (Plural) | Past Participle | |
| Old English | slēan | slōg | slōgan | slægen |
| Contemporary English | slay | slew | slew | slain |
Why, then, don’t we say stay–stew–stain instead of stay–stayed–stayed? The short answer is that stay is a regular verb. But we don’t have a complete answer. That is, we don’t entirely know why some verbs went with the flow and used the regular conjugation, but others stayed strong and kept an irregular conjugation. We also don’t really know why fit–fitted–fitted succumbed to fit–fit–fit. However, the odds are that the first person to utter the new irregular conjugation had sufficient status and influence to make the rest of us go, “Wow, that sounds so smart!”
References
Baugh, Albert, and Thomas Cable. 2001. A History of the English Language, pp. 202-204.
Copperud, Roy. 1980. American Usage and Style: The Consensus.
Garner, Bryan. 2009. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Third Edition.
Garner, Bryan. Language-Change Index at http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=52.
Gelderen, Elly van. 2006. A History of the English Language.
Rumelhart, David E., and James L. McClelland. “Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs: Implicit Rules or Parallel Distributed Processing?” In Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, Brian MacWhinney, editor. 20th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1987.
Answers
1b The company forecast a 20% increase in earnings for the fiscal year.
2b Last night, meteorologist Greg Fishel forecast a major storm for this weekend.
3b The show was broadcast from Rockefeller Center.
4b The actor’s costume fit the role.
5a If those shoes had been properly fitted, you wouldn’t have blisters.
Ratings in Garner’s Language-Change Index
Cast (stage 5): The conjugation is cast–cast–cast.
Fit (stage 5): The conjugation is fit–fit–fit. Exception: “. . . where the fit is a physical coupling, fitted is the natural choice.” Possible exception: Statistical fit.
Forecast (stage 5): The conjugation is forecast–forecast–forecast. Forecasted is Stage 1. Possible exceptions: financial writing, statistical writing, and scientific writing.