From the sports page of today's Daily Pennsylvanian: "Penn should have ran on first down."

Ouch. Aspiring authors should *run* from poor grammar such as this.

Actually, in the author's defense, the one use of such phrasing within the article itself is correct:

"I cannot help but wonder, though, if this game would have turned out differently had Penn run the ball more in the first half."

So, is the error in the headline the fault of a careless young author or a careless young sports-page editor (or web-content manager) who added it after-the-fact?

At least it doesn't say "should of."

I've come across far too many of those in this last batch of papers.

Everybody knows you have to pass on first down to surprise the defense. Sheesh! ;o)

And at least it wasn't "Penn should have ran on it's first down."

It seems the best and brightest at Penn may have just discovered a new construct - the present, and far from perfect, tense.

Yargh.

RUN RUN RUN

I'm sending the nuns after you. with big rulers.

David

Erin, I'm disappointed in this post of yours. I hope this doesn't reflect badly on the Penn English Department, which should know better. Let's start to foucs on effective communication, not ridiculous and petty prescriptive grammar rules which have no bearing on the situation.

The _DP_ writer conveyed the point he or she was trying to convey. That's the bottom line. The writer here was simply extending an innate-acquired rule which applies to majority of verbs in English, where the past tense form of a verb is identical to the past participle, and applying it to the to cases where this does not hold. This is called language change in progress. Regularization of an irregular form. Extension by analogy. Languages change! Get over it! Stop trying to hold on to the past.

For example:

Present - Past - Past Participle

spoil - spoiled - spoiled
taste - tasted - tasted
kick - kicked - kicked

but:

run - ran - run

For many people, "run" is no longer used as a past participle, and has been replaced by "ran", which is not surprising given that these two forms are identical for most verbs in English. It is, in fact, a welcome change to the English language as it makes things more simple.

Perhaps more demonstratively, does anyone actually say stuff like "That is he!" anymore when pointing out someone they see in a crowd to their friend? I would burst out laughing if I caught myself saying something like that. That is another case where language has changed, and even the most ardent prescriptivists have grown to accept this as the norm.