We Had Went

I think most of my regular subscribers know that I am hooked on the TV show “Judge Judy.” I am always astonished by how many family members sue each other, how many pit bulls end up hurting smaller dogs at dog parks, and how some people take each other to court and go hundreds of miles away to be on TV to sue for $280. But I think what surprises me the most is the language. So many people cannot conjugate sentences. I don’t know who their English teachers were. How many teachers must have had the students year after year and just passed them when they couldn’t possibly have been passing their quizzes, tests, or essays?

Here’s my latest pet peeve: had went. No, no, no, this is never going to work as any kind of a construction anywhere. If you want to use the past tense of go, with a helping verb like have, the proper way to say that you went someplace is to say, “I had gone. We had gone. She had gone. Mario had gone.” Now if you want to use the word went, that’s just fine. Then you don’t use an auxiliary term like have. You just go directly to went. “I went, he went, she went, they went.” Simple! The Macdonalds went to the Bahamas and had a fabulous time. Why not? The only way to ruin the sentence would be "The Macdonalds had went to the Bahamas."  Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s very easy to remember, though, if you think that went stands on its own, and every time you want to use the word had, you want to use gone instead of went.

You can always make a cheat sheet for yourself if you find it hard to memorize these. Put into like this in your phone. I do that all the time with a wide variety of things. Just add a contact and you can call it “The past Tense of Go.” Or if you want to remember this writing tip, call it “I Had Went!”