Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Say what thou wilt

“Children aged 12 to 16 will learn the benefits of using correct grammatical constructions, such as “you were” rather than “you was”, in everyday speech”

I’ve ranted before about how language evolves, and how this is not a bad thing…but really, if we’re going to be complaining about ‘you was’ the complaint should be that it is an over generalisation of ‘you’, taking the place of the now-archaic ‘thou’. Using ‘you was’ and ‘you were’ for second person singular and plural allows a distinction that has otherwise been absent since the adoption of ‘you’ to replace ‘thou’.

Let the language live.


Categories: Memories.

/ 4 Comments

4 comments

  1. sushidog

    The distinction between second person singular and second person plural would be handy, but I don’t think people _do_ use “you was” to indicate singular and “you were” to indicate plural; I think they’re used interchangably, so they don’t actully clarify meaning at all.
    Besides, surely the singular should be “you wert”? :-)

    Reply
  2. strange_complex

    For distinction between singular and plural second person, I rather like the Irish method of saying ‘yous’ instead of ‘you’ when there’s more than one person. E.g. ‘Have yous finished your drinks, now?’

    But no, ‘you was’ will not do for indicating singular rather than plural. As your last poster said, ‘was’ just isn’t the right form for second person singular, and anyway, that isn’t how the people who make this mistake are using it.

    Reply
    • venta

      Bah, beat me to it. “Yous” isn’t just an Irish thing, we do it in the northeast as well. And very useful it is, too.

      I also agree that “you was” doesn’t currently get used to distinguish singular from plural. Compare and contrast with the Yorkshire habit of saying “it were him” instead of “it was him” :)

      Reply

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