Getting drank

Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth: 

Photo: @nicholasd on instagram

The verb drink is one of our irregular verbs, as it doesn't have a past tense of drinked, adding the regular past tense ending -ed, and instead changes its vowel, so you say I drank beer not I drinked beer. It also does this for the participle, which is what you use for various things including perfect aspect (I have drunk beer) and passive (The beer was drunk by me). This passive participle is also the one we use for things like relative clauses (The beer that is drunk on Earth). 

But there is variation! Not everyone has all three of these forms in all contexts. For a lot of people, drank is used for all the non-present forms (I drank the beer, I have drank the beer), while for others, drunk is used (I drunk the beer, I have drunk the beer). For everyone, the adjective is drunk, though (no one says I am drank!), which I think is a nice indication that it's somehow separate from the verb. 

In formal English, then, this slogan would say Out of this world beer, drunk on Earth, because it's the relative clause type: this is short for which is drunk on Earth. They've chosen instead to go with the form used in more informal contexts and said Drank on Earth. The company's image is very informal and friendly, so they presumably felt it fit more with that vibe, and it has the added benefit of not being mistaken for the adjective which might imply getting drunk, not a good look from the point of view of the advertising standards people. 

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? 

Very dedicated police force

I’m writing this on a train to Yorkshire (an East Midlands Railway train, train fans!). The announcer chap said that if we saw anything suspicious, we should contact a member of ‘the railway’s very dedicated police force’, the British Transport Police. Oh how I laughed. See, he’s taken a standard phrase ‘dedicated police force’, which contains the word ‘dedicated’, meaning they work specifically for the railways, are dedicated just to them. But he’s used that same word, ‘dedicated’, in a different way, meaning that they care about their job, they are dedicated workers. 

But - and this is important - all he did was add ‘very’. He did nothing else at all to alter the sentence. So how did I know that the meaning had changed? LINGUISTICS, people! In the standard phrase, ‘dedicated’ is a participle. It is shorthand for ‘the police force that is dedicated to the railway’ - it’s a form of the verb, in other words. And as a verb form, it can’t be modified by ‘very’. Things like ‘I’m very running’ or ‘I very work’ are not grammatical for the same reason. In the one he actually said, he used ‘very’. So the word ‘dedicated’ can’t be a participle. It must be an adjective, which is what ‘very’ can modify: ‘I’m very tired’, ‘I’m very clever’, ‘The very hungry caterpillar’, for example. And if ‘dedicated’ is an adjective, it no longer functions as the participle; it’s an attribute of the person it applies to, in this case the British Transport Police. 

All that from a simple addition of ‘very’! Honestly you people, how are you not constantly as amazed as me at how cool language is? 

Filled with vs full of

Apologies for the scarcity of posts; I've been moving house and we've been internetless and busy. Should be back to normal soon. In the meantime, have a brief observation on the subtle difference in meaning different syntactic structures can imply. 

Reece Shearsmith tweeted this photograph yesterday:

'Please do not use: machine filled with BEES'

Someone commented beneath it that using filled with rather than full of makes it sound 'almost like somebody has done it deliberately'. Full is an adjective, related to the verb fill. Filled is the past or passive participle of the same verb. As is clear from this photo, the adjective and participle can often be used interchangeably, and give basically the same meaning. Sometimes, there isn't an adjective and we just use the participle for everything: consider She is qualified to teach the course. Qualified is just like filled, and there's no corresponding adjective to full to use instead.

If we have two words that are basically the same, you'll often find a subtle distinction in use, which is why we have the sense that filled with has more 'agency' (i.e. someone did it) than full of (which is just a state of affairs). Because filled can be the passive participle, we perhaps interpret this as meaning that the machine (has been) filled with BEES (by someone).

Anyhow, don't use the machine. It's got BEES in it.

De-funk

Someone who shall remain nameless recently said the following about a piece of technology:

It might defunk.

Wooohoooo, reanalysis in action! Reanalysis is when someone interprets the structure (or meaning, etc) of a word or phrase differently from previous speakers. This can result in widespread permanent change to the language in question, and in fact is how much language change takes place. For instance, we all know that apron and adder were originally napron and nadder, but because a nadder is identical to an adder when it's spoken, people reanalysed it as the latter. Ditto peas and cherries, which are now the plural forms of the singular pea and cherry, but when they were first borrowed from French they were pease and cherise - mass nouns. We still have pease pudding and the colour word cerise (that one was probably borrowed again later on, though).

The reanalysed word in question is defunct, meaning something like 'not working'. This comes from Latin, literally meaning 'not working' (dēfunctus, with the prefix de- and the past participle of fungī 'to perform', says the OED). We don't really think about the etymology when we use it though, especially if we don't know Latin, which most people don't. So it's just a word that means 'not working' or 'not in use'.

The reanalysis has come about because the word-final consonant /t/ sounds just like the past participle ending -ed. (This is because -ed can sound like /d/ or /t/ depending on the sound it follows.) Therefore, defunct sounds exactly like defunked. Defunked doesn't exist (with this meaning), but it follows the pattern for verbs in English, with a regular past tense ending. So we can postulate that the word is the past participle of defunk. If that's the case, the verb can be used in all its forms, including the bare stem form used in the original example, defunk.

The process I've hypothesised here takes a word which is used in its current form as an adjective and reanalyses it back into its past participle form (possibly even complete with negative prefix on the root funk) from whence it came!

(By the way, clever people have of course spotted the potential for the word as a band name, so it's hard to google for other examples. But the fact that hits for this interpretation don't outweigh the band's hits shows that this is either non-existent or very rare so far. In addition, Urban Dictionary notes the verb with the meaning 'to remove funk [dirt]' or 'to make less funky', both predictable meanings of de-+funk.)