I used to think that replacing “saw” with “seen” in everyday speech was just a redneck stereotype, until I started working in news and had to process eyewitness sound bites. Here’s a great example from the recent CNN story on the girl whose feet were severed on a Six Flags ride:
Unlike most grammatical mistakes, which can be chalked up to poor syntax, colloquialisms, or deliberate affectations, “seen” stands out to me as being an uncanny mass misapprehension over the correct word form to use.
So, how did a large subset of the population manage to perpetuate this odd mistake? And who comprises that subset? (The answer may seem obvious, but this error is definitely not confined to one specific U.S. region or age/race demographic.) Are there any other mistakes that parallel the seen/saw confusion?
And I’m not talking about youngsters who refuse to conjugate their verbs, then turn on the grammar for a job interview, or words like “ain’t” that are ingrained in all of us, whether we like it or not. I’m asking, are there any other words that are used incorrectly, in speech, unawares, on such a large scale?
That’s not the only one. You often hear the wrong word couple with “had”: had went, had drank. I think it just happens because people don’t learn irregular conjugations as well as the more usual one.
What you call a “mistake” and a “mass misapprehension”, most linguists would describe as a simple dialect variation in accepted grammatical forms. As this article notes,
Males, mostly. As per this article, “Usage Preferences of Men and Women: Did, Came, and Saw”. (For those who don’t have JSTOR access, it’s by W. R. Van Riper, in American Speech 54, 4, 1979, 279-284.)
That’s pretty interesting, and explains a lot. I’m still puzzled, though; education and a lack of ignorance would mean that people who are using “seen” have certainly been exposed to “saw.” So why don’t these people use “saw” when speaking to news reporters, and “seen” when among their peers?
Well, not everybody “code switches” in the same way, when it comes to using different dialects in different situations. You’re suggesting that the natural impulse would be for people to code-switch to the “standard” or “approved” dialect when addressed by somebody speaking that standard dialect, especially if it’s in a somewhat “formal” situation like being interviewed by a reporter.
I think a lot of people do code-switch that way, but evidently not everybody does. Some people identify very closely with the dialect they use most often, and won’t switch to the “standard” dialect unless they’re officially told to. Some people associate dialect with perceptions of social status, and feel that speaking the “standard” dialect would make them seem “phony” or “la-di-da” or “pretentious”. Some people speak their own dialect so continuously that they end up pretty much forgetting the rules of the “standard” dialect they learned in school, and thus cannot code-switch effectively anymore. Some people code-switch according to what they’re wearing, or what location they’re in, rather than according to what dialect the people around them are speaking.
And, according to the second link I posted above, men apparently tend to code-switch less readily than women. I have no idea why that is.
My wife, for one. She’s from rural Indiana, and will often say, “I seen…” When we first got together, I tried to break her of it, by saying, “You didn’t seen it, you saw it.” She came back with, “I didn’t saw it, I seen it.”