Laying it down

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> "I saw John laid his book down"

"I seen him done it"

by coincidence, was presented in my high-school, English "'grammar*
textbook as the quintessential "ungrammatical" sentence, spoken by a
person represented as a cartoon of a stereotypical, uneducated hick.

For *dekkids*, this struck me as *the* most ridiculous string ever
construed in English. If it popped into my head when I was with other
people, I'd have to explain why I had suddenly burst into laughter.

Nowadays, I see it as a mere stylistic variant, instead of as
something that not even the least-educated native-speaker of English
could possibly say. After all,

Youneverknow.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org