A few days ago a Facebook friend posted this image:
with the comment “How delightfully supercilious”.
I have posted before about the usage of I seen and similar expressions. In a post on the OUP blog, (which I quoted in my post, had forgotten, then found again) Anatoly Liberman calls it “substandard but ubiquitous in conversational English”. I would call it ‘non-standard but widespread’. I don’t use it, I don’t like it and I would correct any English language learner or writer (unless they were clearly someone who uses this, or was writing in the persona of someone who does) who used it, but anything that widespread, consistent and persistent can’t be dismissed out of hand.
I searched on Google Ngrams for ‘I been, I was, I have been’, ‘I done, I did, I have done’ and ‘I seen, I saw, I have seen’ (which are the three examples Liberman discusses, and probably the most common). Not surprisingly, the usage of ‘I been’, ‘I done’ and ‘I seen’ show up like a worm trail at the bottom of the graph, indicating that these forms are used, just very much less (compared with a straight line across the bottom, meaning minimal usage, or even the message ‘No valid ngrams to plot!’).
I’m not surprised by that. No doubt some of those are mentions in discussions like these and not uses. (Not shown (thought about later): ‘I’ve been’, ‘I’ve done’ and ‘I’ve seen’, which Google treats separately.)
But my eye was caught by the significant growth in ‘I was’, ‘I did’ and ‘I saw’ in the last 30-40 years. And that isn’t confined to those three words – all of the fifteen or so more-or-less randomly chosen past tense verbs (irregular and regular) I tested show a similar significant rise. (‘I am’, ‘I do’, ‘I have’ and ‘I see’ also show a similar result.)
Unlike some usages, which are clearly explained by world events or technological or social change (resulting in more or less use), I can’t think of any convincing reason why this might be. The only possibility is the rise of personal blogging, but surely that wouldn’t be a large enough part of the dataset to result in such a significant rise, and blogging didn’t become a thing until the late 1990s and widespread until the 2000s, whereas those ngram results start in the early 1990s or even earlier.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 