I’ll state right off that my girlfriend is not only a published author many times over, but also is a college professor of the Grammar Nazi type. She knows how to construct a sentence. She considers spell and grammar checkers to be a waste of hard drive space. The last time she opened a dictionary was three years ago, and that was to prove something to me.
But she was stumped this weekend.
I bought too many cans of soda. I said “Oh, that’s just a waste of money.”
She replied “It’s OK. They’ll get drunk.”
Drinked?
Dranken?
Droinked?
Is there any possible word (other than “consumed”) that will make this sentence work?
I personally hate the use of the word “Nazi” to describe people who merely correct the spelling and/or grammar of people. It’s obnoxious and defensive and disprespectful to those who were killed by ACTUAL Nazis.
And your girlfriend is not stumped. “They’ll be drunk,” is correct, since “be” is an auxilliary verb.
I think that this is a past participial question. The p.p. of eat is eaten. So, “It was eaten.” However, and this may well not be a real rule, I think that you also use the p.p. when using will be. So, “It will be eaten.”
Same with drunk. “It was drunk.” “It will be drunk.”
An Americanism is to substitute get for be. So, “It will be drunk” becomes “It will get drunk.”
None of that is based on intimate knowledge though, so ignore it when someone more knowledgable does arrive.
Of course, “the soda will get drunk [by us]” leads to unintentionally comic images of soda cans full of bonhomie, singing rousing choruses of Lynyrd Skynnyrd songs at the tops of their voices, so it might be best to say, “We will drink them.”
I didn’t mean to offend, and sorry if I did, but “Grammar Nazi” is a standard, accepted, tongue-in-cheek term around here. And if you knew my girlfriend, you’d realize how ill-fitting “Nazi” is to her. Goose-stepping is usually not on her to-do list. So the term is sort of funny, in an ironic way.
But not to get OT.
And your girlfriend is not stumped. “They’ll be drunk,” is correct, since “be” is an auxilliary verb.
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They’ll be drunk? They’ll get drunk? I thought that “drunk” was not the past-tense of “drink.” I thought “drank” was. But “they’ll get drank” sounds just as bad.
Ah, if only the English language were that simple. Some verbs have past participle and past tenses. Ate and eaten are another example (as someone pointed out). So are ran and run. So “I drank the soda,” but “I have drunk the soda.” “The cake was eaten,” but “we ate the cake.” “I ran the computer program.” “The computer program was run.” Etc.
They’ll be drunk? They’ll get drunk? I thought that “drunk” was not the past-tense of “drink.” I thought “drank” was. But “they’ll get drank” sounds just as bad.
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Drink, drank, drunk. Swim, swam, swum.
I swim, I swam, I have swum.
I drink, I drank, I have drunk.
To paraphrase a quote from one of the Hitchhiker books off the top of my head,
“…it’ll make you feel like you’re drunk.”
“What’s so bad about feeling like you’re drunk?”
“Ask a glass of water. It was sort of a threat, you see. I’m not all that good at them.”
One was, I think, Ford telling Arthur that travelling in hyperspace feels “unpleasantly like being drunk.” Arthur: “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” Ford: “You ask a glass of water.”
The other is a bit fuzzier in my mind, but I think it’s Slaartibartfast telling Arthur to get a move on or “you’ll be late.” Arthur: “Late for what?” Slaartibartfast: “Late, as in the late Arthur Dent.”
Why did that sentence seem problematic to you in the first place? It’s ambiguous, that’s true, but it’s pretty easy to construct grammatical sentences that are ambiguous. The context was obviously enough for you to figure out that the coke cans weren’t going to be stumbling around and singing loudly . . .
Drunk. I have drunk, you have drunk, he has drunk . . . “to drink” is a perfectly normal strong verb (a verb that forms its past tense and past participle tenses by a vowel change rather than by adding endings. There are strong and weak verbs in most or all of the Germanic languages.) and drunk is its past participle. Compare “I have eaten” and “They’ll get eaten” - seem grammatical? Well, “They’ll get drunk” works the same way.
I guess there’s probably some stigma attached to the word “drunk” because, dialectually, it can be used as a past tense (“I drunk a six pack last night.”) and this usage is considered non-standard and frequently (though, of course, incorrectly) considered a sign of poor education. That doesn’t mean that all usages of the word “drunk” are incorrect.
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