Chalking up an embarrassing mistake

It was the first week of French class. The teacher, a graduate student named -- what else? -- Marie, asked for a volunteer to come to the board to show the class how to conjugate the verb “to be.”

My hand shot up. “I studied that last night. I’ll do it.”

I marched up to the board, sassy to the point of being slappable, took the chalk and proudly wrote “etre,” even getting right the dapper little hat-shaped accent over the first “e.” I stood back to allow Marie and the rest of the class to admire my work.

There was a heavy silence, which I figured must be awe. But the praise I awaited, alas, was not to be.

A hard-core stickler could have, at this point, made pudding out of me. But Marie was gentle.

“Uh, no. Conjugate it.”

I stared at her blankly for a moment as my brain slowly began putting two and two together.

Realizing I was up a creek, there was nothing I could do but let out a ditzy laugh, mutter something to the effect of, “tee hee, silly me,” and return to my seat.

When you study a foreign language, new verbs never fly solo.

They enter each lesson as whole sets, words with many different forms you learn all at once. Say what you will about the difficult of learning foreign languages, but in this respect, foreign languages are easier than our native tongue.

For example, you don’t need anyone to teach you how to say, “I pet my dog,” but are you 100% sure how to put that in the past tense? If you’re talking about yesterday, is it, “I pet him” or “I petted him”? And what about the past tense forms of “bet,” “wet,” “upset” and “split”?

No one ever sat us down and told us the past tense forms and past participles of every English word. We just picked them up -- effortlessly -- through total immersion in the language. We use them without thinking. But when we do stop and think about certain words, we sometimes realize we know less than we thought we did.

That’s why we have dictionaries. Of course, dictionaries often pose the same problem: No one ever really teaches us how to use them, we just sort of dive in. But if we just invest a moment of our time, we can master this stuff once and for all.

“Webster’s New World College Dictionary” includes conjugated verb forms only when they’re irregular or tricky. For example, if you look up “walk,” you’ll find no inflected forms under its definition. If a verb’s past tense is formed simply by adding “-ed” at the end of the word, and if its participial form just adds and “-ing,” then this dictionary doesn’t spell them out for each word. Trickier verbs, such as “pet,” include bold type entries after the main form: “pet’ted, pet’ting.”

Notice that these forms don’t just add “-ed” and “-ing.” They add “ted” and “ting.” And that’s how we know that yesterday you petted your dog.

So it should work the same way for “bet,” right? Wrong. The bold type after the entry for the verb “bet” reads: “bet or bet’ted, bet-ting.” Dictionaries always list preferred forms first, which means the preferred past tense is “bet.” “I frequently bet on sports,” takes the same form as, “Yesterday I bet on sports.”

For “upset,” the past tense is the same as the infinitive. “Don’t upset the applecart,” and, “Yesterday I upset the applecart.”

For “wet” you have a choice, but the short form is preferred. “I wet my hair before I wash it,” and, “Yesterday I wet my hair.”

And for “split,” the past tense is always just “split.” “Today I must split some cable,” and, “Yesterday I split some cable.”

And with that, I must split. Au revoir.

This column is dedicated in loving memory to my cat Eddie.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

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