…and I don’t care. Because once again, my reading’s suspension has taken a pounding.
You Brits are supposed to have invented the language; why can’t you fucking speak it?
— Dennis Farina (Snatch)
Ummm “been sat” ? What the fuck does that mean? Should it read “been sitting” or “sat” or (what I think they wanted to say, but I can’t really tell) “left to sit”?
Creating compound verbs without regard to proper tense grates on me more than a Hillary Clinton campaign speech. Here’s another example of the same illiterate bullshit:
“He was sat on a bench” — nice mix of past imperfect (was) with the past perfect (sat) there, you illiterate asswipes. Correct usage:
“He was sitting on a bench” — OR —
“He sat on a bench” BUT NOT a combination of the two.
FFS, I need a drink, and it’s not even 7 o’clock yet.
But that’s the Daily Mail work experience boy in action.
Perhaps the headline was composed by a recent American hire, and the editor shortened it from “has done been sat.”
.
Maybe it was Auto Corrected to that foolishness.
Better: “been sitting in a garage.”
Best: “been in a garage” or “left in a garage.”
That’s the whole point. English always gives us at least half a dozen ways to describe things and situations, all grammatically correct.
So why use an incorrect one?
Maybe editing was outsourced to the Punjab like everything else. Or maybe some other fifth world hell hole where shoes and indoor plumbing are a foreign concepts
Yes, the headline writer is uneducated twit. But he also has completely underestimated the value of an unrestored, mostly original Ferrari with a known provenance even if it is only a wrong side drive 330 GT. I suspect it will go for a lot more than just 70K pounds – particularly now that the Pound has lost a lot of value against the $.
This doesn’t seem like Autocorrect to me. Two things that butcher the language (there are three if you count the laws) are headlines and For-sale-ads, both trying to fit too many letters into too few spaces.
While ugly and incorrect, that’s common colloquial English usage that has a particular meaning.
“Been sitting” implies that the car has been passively sitting there all by itself, perhaps forgotten. “Been sat” implies that someone actively put (ie “sat”) it there, and has been keeping it sitting there intentionally all this time, but not paying too much attention to it. “Been stored” would obviously be far better usage, but that might imply a greater degree of care applied to the vehicle than the writer intended to imply.
I dont know whether the usage reflects the actual situation, but that’s the sense of that construction.
FWIW, the hill I will die on is “could of” and its awful variants that are spreading like weeds through the language.
The writer of that piece (and most of the tabloids in the UK) is probably 2 or even 3 generations removed from mine.
Completed O and A levels in 1969. The UK educational system in country was far worse than that of the overseas British Schools even by that date. I believe we are seeing the effects of dumbing down and pervasive intrusion of gutter language over the Queen’s English (as it was back then).
I think we can now safely call modern British word craft the King’s English, and attribute it directly to Charlie the third. what with all his NWO and Green proselytizing (which he might actually have to cease).
And don’t get me started on California invented phonetic spelling, most co-workers of mine from CA (similar age group) and in highly technical fields, could not spell worth a tinker’s damn. On occasion found myself editing/correcting their papers and presentations simply to minimize embarrassment in the board room and with their bosses. That “new way” of teaching has destroyed U.S. education as it spread (as do most bad ideas) from CA to the rest of the nation.