A Word, Please: Grammar often brings out our inner ‘smarty pants’

“A person learning English as a second language just asked me the difference between ‘burned’ and ‘burnt’ — and I just stared blankly back with a 404 error screen running through my brain,” a poster on Reddit wrote recently, seeking help understanding the difference.

Then something strange happened. The Reddit moderator deleted the original post and replied, “Abusing my mod(erator) power to say they’re the same thing. The -t suffix appears in some other varieties of the past tense, such as “dreamed” and “dreamt.” … It is a pretty common thing in languages that when people notice two words for the same thing, they ascribe different meanings to each one.”

I don’t read Reddit a lot, but it’s hard to imagine something like this happening with another subject — like if someone in an auto repair subreddit asked, “What gasket should I use for my carburetor?” and the moderator deleted the question to say, “I took this post down because the correct answer is cellulose.”

But grammar does this to people. It makes us, present company included, righteous in our rightness. And yes, Moderator Smarty Pants was right, essentially. But he or she wasn’t exactly helpful. The helpful reply would have been: “The answers to questions like these are always in the dictionary — if you know how to find them.”

For every irregular verb, dictionaries list simple past and past participle forms, in that order, right after the entry word. For example, look up “go” and right after it you’ll see “went, gone.” Once you know that dictionaries list the past followed by participle forms, you can figure out that the simple past tense is “went” and the tenses that go with “have” use “gone”: I go. I went. I have gone.

Some verbs, like “think,” use the same word for the past participle as for the simple past: I think, I thought, I have thought. In those cases, dictionaries don’t repeat themselves. They list just the simple past tense, “thought,” indicating that’s the past participle, too.

Regular verbs, however, don’t show different forms after the entry word. Look up “walk,” for example, and you won’t see “walked, walked” next to it to indicate that the past forms are “I walked” and “I have walked.” So if you don’t see past forms after a verb, you know it follows the regular pattern of just adding “ed,” or just “d” if the verb already has an “e” on the end, like “chase,” “bake,” etc.

How could you know all this without my telling you? It’s right in the dictionary in a section called “Explanatory notes” or “How to use this dictionary” or something along those lines.

Back when we relied on print dictionaries, this guidance was easier to find — a whole section right at the beginning. True, we flipped right past that section to get straight to a word we wanted to look up. But at least we could find it if we wanted to. Nowadays you have to go hunting for that information. Merriam-Webster’s has it in the “help” section of its website under a section called “explanatory notes” in a subsection called “inflected forms,” which describes how these past forms of verbs are shown right next to the entry word.

Sometimes the inflected forms shown include multiple options, which is where we find our answer for the question the Reddit editor shut down. Under “burn,” we see “burned or burnt.” And the word “or” is key here.

“When a main entry is followed by the word ‘or’ and another spelling, the two spellings occur with equal or nearly equal frequency and can be considered equal variants,” Merriam’s explains in its section on variants. “Both are standard, and either one may be used according to personal inclination.”

My personal inclination leans strongly toward “burned” as a verb, leaving “burnt” exclusively as an adjective. But if you disagree, I won’t try to silence you.

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.