Boughten?!
You have seen the bumper-sticker: "Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids." What is also hereditary is using the ungrammatical-yet-useful words that your kids coin. The other day Manisha said to me, "This is something I shouldn't have boughten." I stopped, turned around to look at her and said, "Boughten? You too?" She said, "I know this is getting bad. Some day I am afraid I will say broughten in a meeting!" Tooken (as in the past participle of take) has already become a regular word in our household. And so the evolution of the English language continues...
Labels: Supriya
posted by MP at 10:49 PM
12 Comments:
I've tooken a poll, and more people have boughten into the creative past participle of "to buy" than "to take".
8:30 AM
Thanks for the chuckle!
Tooken and broughten sound so Middle English that I am compelled to rewrite your comments: "I have a poll tooken, and more people have into the creative past participle boughten of "to buy" than "to take"."
What say you, she of the quick wit and the acerbic tongue?
10:07 AM
Said poll consisted of one participant: me. I've used boughten, and even boughtened (you know - the real past participle) and I'm only mildly ashamed to admit it.
Me thinks English of neither the Olde nor Middle speaks well I.
Am I supposed to channel Yoda?
10:38 AM
Yoda does in Middle English talk, does he not?
And don't ever forget: you don't channel Yoda. Yoda channels you. If you are good enough.
10:49 AM
"If you are good enough."
Which I most definitely am. Yes.
10:58 AM
You guys are having too much fun. "Boughten" is actually a Pennsylvania Dutch word, used by the Amish,amongst others. Such a word spoken by a grown up wouldn't even make me blink, though it does bring to mind other words like "doplich" and "wutz." I'm going to go outen the lights naw. See yous around.
4:39 AM
Okay. I give. What are "doplich" and "wutz" (beside a low-rent sounding law firm)?
7:54 AM
Doplich (hard K sound at the end) is clumsy, and wutz is a greedy person, though I think I've heard it used interchangeably with idiot, too. The two words together do make for an interesting sounding law firm--perhaps I'll use that in the continuing saga of Martin Yoder. I'll be sure to give you a byline, LB.
9:54 AM
What I gather is: Boughten was used in the Northern United States before the Civil War.
I recall seeing a linguistic map of the United States: Southern linguistics spread, pretty much straight west south of the Mason-Dixon line, tapered some by the Ohio River, but springing back up to the Missouri river, eventually petering out in Kansas, though extending farther west as you go south into Oklahoma and Texas.
Middle Atlantic English fanned out from a narrow base in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
New England Linguistics only makes little leap frogs into some areas along the coast of the Great Lakes, especially Northern Michigan, and oddly in the vicinity of Minneapolis. But then there's a New England archipelago in the Pacific North West. The first permanent American settlement there being Astoria, settled by the first American Millionaire by the name of Astor, who made his fortune fur trading. Astoria, Portland, and Seattle later supported the whaling trade of the 1840s - and so that explains the presence of an island of New England Linguistics on the opposite side of the Continent.
Before the civil war, use of boughten was fairly prominenent the farther north you went, but not used in the South. After the Civil War, the South went into an 80 year depression (ended only by World War II) and so many southerners had to move north to find opportunity, and bye in bye boughten went out of use - even in New England. However, it never went out of use in Portland and Seattle.
As it happens, I spent three years working at a University in Korea, where 80% of the native English speakers were Canadian, and 80% of them were from British Columbia and 80% of them were from Vancouver. Everyone knows that the linguistics on boths sides of the Canadian border are largely the same on an east-west basis, be it Ontario and the American Mid-West, Saskatchewan and Montana or British Columbia and Washington state.
So New England linguistics overlapped into Vancouver (the suburbs of each are only about 60 miles a part). For 3 years, the bulk of my English speaking was with the Canadians I shared space with at the University. I have been back in the United States for a year and 4 months, but last week someone corrected me as I used the phrase "I had boughten some gas there before..."
I this had moved into my speech unnoticed as I really don't pay attention to such things. Now I'm wondering what to do with it.
In the mean time, the Pacific Northwest has become more important - thanks to Microsoft and the growing importance of software and information technologies and the use of Vancouver as a second city to Hollywood. I must say I seem to like it, but regardless it makes me want to go and re-read "The Story of English" and Bryson's "Mother Tongue" (the later is not recommended as Bryson is not a reliable source factually speaking, but entertaining on some level).
2:58 PM
Thanks for the edification Tim!
4:01 PM
actually 'boughten' is an old word and was used more frequently in decades and centuries past. Many old books, especially before the mid- 1800s will contain it. "Tooken" is also old.
12:25 PM
"Boughten" survives dialectically in Iowa and some parts of Michigan, as well.
4:10 PM
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