This post contains material from the New York Times article Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher, by Dave Phillips, published on December 27, 2019. The post will help you learn to use irregular past-tense verbs in English, and to understand why the US military voted for Joe Biden, 50%-45%.
So, one day I land at an airport in the US, and I jump in a taxi, and the driver is an Oromo guy. He’s listening to some American talk radio program, and as we get to chatting, I see that he speaks excellent American English. One thing, though: he gets lots of common irregular past tenses wrong. Eated, speaked, seed–stuff like that. And I wonder: you listen to American English radio all day, you speak to anglophones all day, you’re totally immersed in the language–how do you still mess up common irregular forms? Not in a critical way, right? Non-rhetorical question: how does one manage to speak a language pretty well while still fucking up really common aspects of the language?
Six years go by, and I go from having taken one semester of French in college in the early 1990s to speaking French well enough that when I meet a Frenchie for the first time, I typically have to convince them that I’m an American. (No French person ever thinks that I’m from where they’re from, but, yeah–I usually have to tell them that I’m an American, and I usually have to insist.)
About 80% of French verbs form their past tense (participle, actually, but whatever) by adding é at the end–the past participle lu of the verb to read is highly irregular.
And yet: yesterday I’m talking to a francophone friend, and I ask him the French equivalent of Did you readed the article that I sent you? (T’as li le reportage que je t’ai envoyé, rather than T’as lu le reportage que je t’ai envoyé). I watch YouTube videos about every subject under the sun in French, I read Wikipédia in French, I occasionally go up to two weeks without speaking anything but French–in other words, I am every bit as immersed in French as that Oromo guy is in English, but I still fuck up really frequent irregular forms.
From Wikipedia: “The United States Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Teams, commonly known as Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy’s primary special operations force and a component of the Naval Special Warfare Command. Among the SEALs’ main functions are conducting small-unit special operation missions in maritime, jungle, urban, arctic, mountainous, and desert environments. SEALs are typically ordered to capture or to eliminate high level targets, or to gather intelligence behind enemy lines.[6]“
Wikipedia
French speakers have been incredibly kind and patient about correcting me for such things for several years, and as a measure of respect and thanks, I offer herewith a little exercise on English verbs that are irregular in the past tense. As material, we’ll use an article published by the New York Times just under a year ago. It’s an excellent piece for this exercise because it includes a number of irregular past tenses. It was published on the occasion on Donald Trump’s interference in a military trial. The circumstances: a US Navy SEAL murdered a prisoner. His own troops turned him in. In a surprise twist, one of the witnesses claimed that he, not the SEAL in question, had murdered the prisoner, and the SEAL was acquitted on most charges. He was convicted on a relatively minor charge, and was demoted as punishment. President Trump reversed the demotion–an excellent way to weaken any military force is to destroy its mechanisms of discipline, and Trump socked the US military in the gut with that move. It wasn’t the end of the story, either, but we’ll get to that later. With that context: let’s get to some verbs.
| Present | Past | Past participle |
| break | broke | broken |
| say | said | said |
| be | was (singular), were (plural) | been |
| can | could | been able to |
| tell | told | told |
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
OK, we’ve seen the examples: now let’s practice using these irregular past tenses. We’ll practice using a technique called a cloze. It involves filling in a blank; it’s a common testing technique in foreign language teaching, and 40+ years ago when I was a young sailor, it was used for teaching pretty much anything via programmed learning. I’ll give you the material from the original article, but with the past-tense verb under test replaced by its infinitive form; you will replace it with the past tense form.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and break into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, say as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, be part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief be dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller tell investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, say in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, tell the investigators.
Vocabulary notes
- midsentence: How it was used in the NY Times article: At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears. More examples:
- “Trump has provided a dark, dank hole into which these folks can dump whatever it is they’re mad about. Even contradictory views, since Trump frequently changes viewpoint in midsentence, can happily nest there, swelling and breeding like poison fungus.” (Source: Twitter)
- Giuliani is literally trying to backtrack midsentence as he’s realized what already came out of his mouth? (Source: Twitter)
- trove: How it was used in the NY Times article: Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder. More examples:
- While clearly using Trump-friendly words here, Kelly knows national security agencies have a trove of incriminating information on Trump & Co. which will be revealed during an orderly transition. The walled-in White House is burning up the shredders… (Source: Twitter)
- The BP Senate Report provides a treasure trove of new details abt Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, & says that a Russian National, Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was a career intelligence officer. (Source: Twitter)
- blistering: How it was used in the NY Times article: They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief be dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
- freaking: In this context, it is a euphemism for the adjective fucking. How it was used in the NY Times article: “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. Some more examples:
- John McCain already told everyone he graduated last in his class but look at a war HERO he became. You do not deserve to lick the dirt on John McCain’s boots. Trump, you are filthy disgusting lowlife and an freaking TRAITOR. You whine like a little girl. (Source: Twitter)
- Just saw Giuliani on Wolf Blitzer. ….what a freaking idiot. (Source: Twitter)
Zipf's Law 
I understand how a person can manage not to hear the details of a language they’re immersed in. I speak American English. Outside of the house, I hear British English. I’ve picked up some of the obvious vocabulary–some to be understood, some to not have people laugh hysterically when I say something–but other bits I seem to simply translate to myself instead of hearing what’s really being said. And I’ve spotted British writers doing it when they write (or try to write) American dialogue. A reported quoted an American as saying something about his mum. Americans don’t have mums. We have moms. A fiction writer slipped in a drinks cabinet–something else Americans don’t have.
Unless we’re actively listening to the surface of the language, as we do when we’re learning it, I think we must look through it as if it were a window so we can pay attention to the content, and if we go to reproduce it later, we substitute our own version of it.
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Yes, and that is demonstrably true from a psycholinguistic experimental perspective, as well—we have a pretty good memory for the meaning of what we’ve heard, but not much of a memory for how, exactly, it was said…
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True. When I began writing fiction, I had to train myself to listen to the surface so I could reproduce it–the word choices, the rhythm, the syntax, the pauses, the entire orchestration of how we speak. It wasn’t instinctive.
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did my reply get to you?? I hit Post without filling in the email info.
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It got blocked for moderation–due to the lack of email info, I imagine. Trying to approve it now, but as has so often been the case lately, WordReference is being weird…
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