ceyjen
01-20-2003, 02:02 PM
It may be strictly regional. I wouldn't know...I don't study individual regional dialectic language.
But around here and in most of the Southwest USA (which is the region in which I have spent most of my life), people routinely say things like, "Yeah, I shoulda went to the gas station when it was $1.34" Or, "I knew I shoulda did that first."
When I hear these phrases come out of people's mouths, it hurts my ears in much the same way a train whistle makes a dog howl.(and I am not just talking about the rednecks/hillbillies/"whatever-your-regional-term-is" down the road...I have heard people from the professional segment of the community use this same appalling language).
Why doesn't this combination of tenses sound wrong to people?
It would be the same as saying, "If only he had was a good student..." instead of, "If only he had been a good student..."
And then, if you tell any of these people (like my SO, for example, who constantly mixes verb tenses like this) what the right word would be, they tell you that it doesn't sound right to say it correctly.
I don't get it. How does something like this become a habit? At what point in these people's lives did teachers and/or parents (providing they did not pass on the same habitual behavior) stop noticing if they ever did. How can these people watch the news or read articles in magazines and not notice that nowhere in that broadcast or article is any example of the way they talk?
But around here and in most of the Southwest USA (which is the region in which I have spent most of my life), people routinely say things like, "Yeah, I shoulda went to the gas station when it was $1.34" Or, "I knew I shoulda did that first."
When I hear these phrases come out of people's mouths, it hurts my ears in much the same way a train whistle makes a dog howl.(and I am not just talking about the rednecks/hillbillies/"whatever-your-regional-term-is" down the road...I have heard people from the professional segment of the community use this same appalling language).
Why doesn't this combination of tenses sound wrong to people?
It would be the same as saying, "If only he had was a good student..." instead of, "If only he had been a good student..."
And then, if you tell any of these people (like my SO, for example, who constantly mixes verb tenses like this) what the right word would be, they tell you that it doesn't sound right to say it correctly.
I don't get it. How does something like this become a habit? At what point in these people's lives did teachers and/or parents (providing they did not pass on the same habitual behavior) stop noticing if they ever did. How can these people watch the news or read articles in magazines and not notice that nowhere in that broadcast or article is any example of the way they talk?