Have we 'boughten' a reason for this word?

By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Staff Writer

The verbs in English are a fright.

How can we learn to read and write?

Today we speak, but first we spoke;

Some faucets leak, but never loke.

Today we write, but first we wrote;

We bite our tongues, but never bote.

Each day I teach, for years I taught,

And preachers preach, but never praught.

This tale I tell: this tale I told;

I smell the flowers, but never smold.

If knights still slay, as once they slew,

Then do we play, as once we plew?

If I still do as once I did,

Then do cows moo, as they once mid.

Prepare to be boughten.

Have boughten? Was boughten?

The word is making its way into the vernacular, if O'ahu speakers have anything to say about it.

We've heard "boughten" crop up in phone interviews, at schoolyards and even in print ("store-boughten," for example).

So we asked professor William O'Grady, chairman of linguistics at the University of Hawai'i: Do you really need the "-en"? After all, isn't bought the past and past participle of buy?

Put a linguist on the job and here's what he found: The American Heritage Dictionary lists "boughten" as a regional variant of "bought," and the Oxford English Dictionary reports that "boughten" may have originated by analogy with "foughten," which was an old form for "fought."

"Boughten," the Oxford English Dictionary says, is found in regional U.S. dialects and also in poetry, for the sake of metre. Coleridge is among those who used it, reports O'Grady, who said linguists call it overcompensation.

"Boughten" isn't pidgin, says his colleague, Mike Forman. In fact, pidgin here lacks "-en" words in general, such as taken or stolen.

Sometimes, these "overcompensations" stay in the language, such as "dived" and "thrived," which forced out "dove" and "throve," O'Grady said.

"Infrequent ones get regularized," O'Grady explained. "Take forms of be — they're too common, and not in danger of being overregularized. What's basically happening is the language is changing (with) each generation."

Hence the advent of new words such as "dot-com," and "e-mail," which didn't exist 10 years ago.

"With somewhere between 150 and 180 irregular verbs in English, it's not surprising that confusion and overregularization occurs," O'Grady said

"In fact, that's one of the main engines of language change, which is constantly going on around us as each generation of children add their own touches to the language of their parents."

Other examples of the competition between traditional irregular forms and the new regularized forms: fit/fitted; wet/wetted; bid/bade; forbid/forbade; thrust/thrusted.

"The 'boughten' example is interesting since it involves double inflection (a double change in the basic form of the word), buy to bought to boughten," he said.

"One very common word that works that way is 'gotten,' as in 'I have gotten the message.'"

But has he gotten the message about "broughten," which we also overheard the other day?

Well, let's not go there.