Oral history on "uptight" (1966)

[Wilson Gray]

An excellent point, Jon. Perhaps it seems prescriptive to me because it was
taught to me when I was a mere child too young to understand that any fool
can write a descriptive rule and call it "prescriptive." Probably explains
why this rule has always seemed to be so amazingly obvious. Like, I *never*
got it wrong on tests. Not that I ever had any trouble with tests. Only with
thesis-writing.

How about this, then? Were others here taught a particular set of principle
parts as belonging to "wake" verbs? I had to learn the following:

wake (up)  waked (up)  waked (up)

wake (up) woke (up)  wakened (*up)

awake  awoke  awoken

awake  awaked  awakened

awaken  awakened  awakened

And Larry, sorry about that. It was just a senior mo  Damn! Where was I
going with that? Oh, well.
--
-Wilson

On 12/31/05, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Oral history on "uptight" (1966)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 5:11 PM -0500 12/31/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >The rule said that -
> >
> >If the sublect of a sentence is of the form, _a_ number [of people], then
> >the verb must be plural: _a_ number [of people] _are_ sitting in the
> stands.
> >
> >If the subject of a sentence is of the form, _the_ number [of people,
> then
> >the verb must be singular: _the_ number [of people] sitting in the stands
> >_is_ small.
> >
> >-Wilson
>
> Shoot.  I thought we had a new term of art here, "sublect".  (Well, I
> may have come across "sublect" in the past, but not in the frame
> "_____ of  a sentence".)  But no, just an old-fashioned typo, it
> appears.
>
> Larry
>