I'm going to go ahead and know it

Today in strange agency verb use: 

Screenshot of a tweet saying "Yeah if you're standing
in front of a Bentley at a Bentley dealership,
I'm going to go ahead and know that's not your car." 

Knowing isn't something that you have much control over. You can try and know things, by learning them or finding them out or whatever, but whether you know something or not is a state of mind, literally. 

It's the phrase go ahead and that gives rise to the oddness here. Without it, I'm going to know that's not your car, is fine. It means that in the scenario described, I will know a fact based on the evidence of my eyes, and my own knowledge and judgement of the likely circumstances (i.e. the car in a dealership is not necessarily your own; you'd probably take a photo of your own car somewhere else; pretending you own a Bentley is a plausible alternative to it actually being your car). 

I hadn't realised before, but go ahead and is actually a peeve for some people. Internet people ask 'why do young people say they're going to go ahead and do something'. The answers tend to be along the lines of it meaning you have the listener's tacit approval, that no one has given you a reason not to do the thing, or that it's a more decisive, proactive action. In any case, all things that one needs to deliberately decide to do – to have agency. 

And, as previously discussed, knowing something is not something that one can do deliberately. You can go ahead and reason that it's not my Bentley, you can go ahead and say that it's not my Bentley, and you can go ahead and assume that it's not my Bentley. But knowing that it's not my Bentley is a state you arrive at, whether you mean to or not. Sometimes, there are things one would rather not know – but you can't help it. 

How much did it costed?

The Conversation tweeted about an article way back in 2018, when things like the World Cup still happened, and included the phrase could have costed (it's also in the article itself):

Watching the #WorldCup during working hours could have costed as much as US$10.4 billion in lost production time (in 2010).

But there are multiple ways employers can make up for this by embracing the tournament: https://t.co/qyewW8oxVQ pic.twitter.com/apqvOr9zgF

— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) June 12, 2018

In Standard English that would be could have cost – cost is irregular and has cost as its past participle as well as the bare form. In fact, costed isn't even the simple past tense of this version of the verb, as that's also cost:

It costs	Present
It cost	Past
It has cost	Perfect

 and so on. 

I say 'this version of the verb' because there's another version of cost that does have costed as the past tense: the one that means 'estimate the price of' rather than 'have a price of', as in We costed the new plans and decided that they were not viable. So there is this form costed that exists, and that you might have heard just as recently as the form cost, and you might reach for that when you're looking for the relevant form to follow the perfect auxiliary have. And then that makes it nice and similar to all the other regular verbs like could have washed, could have dusted, could have wasted, etc. 

I predicted that this mistake would be much less likely to occur with did instead of could have. While could have requires the past participle (actually it's have that requires it, so you'd also get it has lasted us ten years, and by extension possible it has costed us a fortune), did doesn't – it requires the bare form of the verb: Did it last long? rather than Did it lasted long? and so presumably you would expect Did it cost a lot rather than Did it costed a lot? 

Well, never make predictions about what kind of variation people will produce. I'll leave the actual numbers to someone else, but a google search for "did it costed" brings up results, and not just people asking if it's correct to say that (though they're the top hits). There are also examples where it's used as the simple past form, as in I wonder how much that upgrade costed. 

English, amirite? 

Cryptic crossword pursues rather than follows

An occasional hobby of mine is trying to get better at cryptic crosswords. I sometimes print one out from the Guardian and it takes about two weeks between two of us, but eventually we finish it and we feel like we've learnt about how the clues work.

I was stumped on one:

Party leader pursues old educational institution's growth.

Pretty quickly I spotted that 'party leader' meant 'p' – the first letter of 'party'. I also knew that 'pursues' meant that the 'p' would be chasing after the rest of the word. Already, you may notice my problem here. 

If it had said 'follows' then I'd have been looking for a pattern like ___p. The 'p' follows the rest of the word, coming at the end. No worries. But because it said 'pursues', that has a more literal or contentful meaning than 'follows' (which can be entirely metaphorical as in this case), meaning 'chase after at speed' or something. So then, somehow, my odd little mind flipped the direction from the act of writing the word (beginning at the beginning and the rest follows) to something like reading the word from left to right, where the end of the word is ahead (yet to come) and so 'pursues' means that the 'p' is behind it, at the start of the word.

So I was thinking it must be 'Palma', because of 'alma mater', but didn't see how that meant 'growth', and anyway it's clearly 'polyp' - 'poly' is an old educational institution, with 'p' following it.