RIP: Past Participles

• Author: C. Edward Good
• Position: C. Edward Good provides on-site training programs in effective legal writing for corporations, government agencies, professional associations, and law firms. Contact him at 240-GRAMMAR (cell) or cedwardgood@gmail.com. Visit his website at EdGood.com.
• Pages: 11-13

RIP

Past

Participles

BY C. EDWARD GOOD

Just last night at a poker game: “I should have

drank this beer earlier.”

Just last night from the Washington Nation-

als’ broadcast booth: “He could have went to

second base.”

And from the lyrics of “Out the Door” by Stick Fig-

ure: “I could have saw it coming from far and away.”

The past participle is dying a slow death. Why?

Because many people have forgotten—or never

learned—the “principal parts” of verbs. Unfortunately,

most people did not have my middle school English

teacher—Miss Hamrick. For she drilled the principal

parts into our numb little skulls way back in the 1950s.

I can remember Miss Hamrick’s chant to this day:

drink, drank, drunk

go, went, gone

see, saw, seen

As teenagers in Greensboro, North Carolina—

thanks to Miss Hamrick—we just knew how to form

tenses correctly. We would thus say: “I should have

drunk this beer,” “He could have gone to second base,”

and “I could have seen it coming.”

So What Are the Principal Parts of Verbs?

Remember verb conjugation? Sounds a bit kinky, I

know, but writers and talkers have to conjugate verbs to

show the various tenses.

Today, I walk (present tense).

Yesterday, I walked (past tense).

Tomorrow, I will walk (future tense).

Right now as a completed fact: I have walked (pres-

ent-perfect tense).

According to some grammarians, verbs have three

principal parts (go, went, gone). Others point out that

verbs have ve: I go, she goes, she went, she has gone,

she is going. From the ve principal parts of a verb, we

can conjugate a verb in all possible tenses.

So let’s name the ve principal parts for the verb walk:

1. Innitive or rst-person present tense: to walk, I

walk.

2. Past tense: I walked, she walked, we walked.

3. Past participle: I have walked, she has walked,

they have walked.

4. Present tense, third-person singular: she walks,

he walks.

5. Present participle: she is walking, we are walk-

ing, they are walking.

Image: iStockPhoto

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 3, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

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