Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 17:10:21 -0400
From: "Dennis R. Preston" preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PILOT.MSU.EDU
Subject: No subject given
Michael,
On participial 'slown': If it's not in any 'principal' works on usage, the
books should be burned. How else could it be said? (But since this is me,
you can probably advance the hillbilly hypothesis one (bare)foot farther.
dInIs (who seems to be flaunting this ethnicity a lot lately; cain't nobody
say nothing about us Hungarians?)
_Stoled_ sounds pretty natural to me, whether because I'm a convicted l-
vocalizer or for some other reason, but there's another verb principal
part I heard myself using recently that caught me up short. It's not in
any of the three reference works on usage I have consulted so far. Here
it is:
If you weren't going so fast, you could have slown down.
Sound familiar to y'all or is it just my hillbilly English?
Michael Montgomery
Dept of English
Univ of South Carolina
Columbia SC 29208
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)432-1235
Fax: (517)432-2736