Boughten

[Arnold Zwicky]

> As a native Michigander it is completely in my idiolect. When I go
> home, because I see my extended family in social contexts where food
> is involved, I hear it all the time in contrast to homemade.

i'm familiar with it from my childhood, where it was the colloquial
opposite of "homemade".  a more widespread colloquial opposite is the
synthetic compound "store-bought" 'bought at a store', which  is a
formal parallel to "homemade".  (we had a discussion of "store-bought"
and the verb "store-buy" back-formed from it on ADS-L back in 2008,
under the header "more back-formed shopping").

that discussion had an offshoot thread on the variant "store-boughten"
and the shorter "boughten" (with the -en variant of the past
participle).
>
> In fact, it wasn't until I was in my early thirties when I was working
> on that run of B in the American Heritage Dictionary did I come to
> find that not only is it regional, but pretty much everyone outside of
> Michigan finds it pretty weird.

not weird in rural southeastern pennsylvania 50+ years ago.  but it's
certainly (largely) rural, non-standard, and (largely) U.S.  so
different people will have different experience of it.

arnold

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