Had

For the last few years, I've been noticing that my non-native English speakers, especially the Hmong students, are using the auxiliary verb "had" much more than necessary. It's weird. I wish someone would do a study on it.


Here's the sample paragraph I just read that's making me think about this phenomena:

Since last Wednesday we had gotten another chance to rewrite our paper after the feedback we gave the featured writers that day on their essays. I had read over my paper a few times and added a few details that we had heard during workshop. I had even taken some of my feedback into consideration and included those points into my paper. Since then, I added my opinion where it was needed. I had also added some more details of the writer's techniques she used to write her article. I had explained more on how the author portrayed logos and pathos and went more in depth on those topics.

The problem, of course, is that in this narrative of her/his writing process, the timeframe is hard to figure out. What happened when? The "had"s are supposed to indicate action that happened before the past-tense action. Right away, beginning with "Since last Wednesday," the student indicates a time period. The "had gotten" messes up the idea we had going because of the word "since."


I guess English is hard, but listening to Josh talk about Polish verbs, I'm not sure it's any harder than other languages. I wish I knew what was going on here.


Update: The student is a native English speaker! In fact, she's a very privileged suburban teen. 

Brilliant

More than two decades ago, I read Mark Johnson and George Lakoff's book Metaphors We Live By. It knocked my socks off with its brilliance. "Yes," I thought. "Our language reveals the metaphors that shape/control our thinking. I'd never thought about it like that, but he's so right!"

I thought that same thing this morning when I read this article Lakoff wrote: "What Conservatives Really Want." In it, Lakoff lays out all the moves that conservatives make in the public sphere - including shaping/controlling the language ("80% of the talking heads on TV are conservative," Lakoff reminds us - he could make the same claim about "talk radio").

By listing all the moves conservatives make, he reveals that the controlling metaphor of conservatives' worldview is the autocratic "strict father": they want the world to be structured like a head-of-household family where the strict father makes all the decisions, is not questioned, metes out the [necessarily physical] discipline.

With this kind of family, the social contract that Democracy promises (that we-the-people have a social responsibility to our fellow citizens) becomes a threat: helping others in the wider culture undermines the authority of the strict father.

Lakoff articulates SO clearly the views I've had for at least two decades but haven't been able to formulate, other than to say we're living through the last desperate gasps of the Patriarchy. To me, no one talks about the masculine violence that's behind all the criminal activity, economic greed, and gun-toting fear we see around us.

Conservatives campaign on the slogan "Take our country/state back!" (Minnesota's recent Republican candidate for governor used this phrase, even though our state had been suffering under a Republican governor for eight years. No logic there, but "strict fathers" don't work with logic; they work with fear). Back to where, is of course the question. Turning out country back in time seems to be the conservatives' goal - when men were men, women knew their place, and Dad yelling "Get off my lawn!" and following that up with a few firings of a 410 shotgun are appropriate ways to act.

Change is automatically a threat to the "strict father." And our speeded-up, technologically enhanced pace of change scares these fathers (who can also be "Mama Grizzlies"), but "strict fathers" cannot show that they're scared. So they scare everyone else instead. And then use the threat of physical violence against everyone else.

Back to Lakoff: he sees the Wisconsin protests as a hopeful sign of real citizens who want to make the world a better place (real public servants such as teachers, pipe fitters, fire fighters, rather than the fake "public servants" that politicians claim to be, in another theft of a good metaphor). I applaud his article and want to share it far and wide.

Read it and pass on his clear thinking.

Text Message Abbreviations in Irish

(Click here or above.)

Thanks, Omniglot - The Blog (not to be confused with its parent, Omniglot: Writing Systems & Languages of the World)