Mind your language | 3 July 2010

A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’.

A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’. Veronica has also shown me an article in the Daily Mail about sex tourists in Thailand, which says: ‘Sat at a crowded bar at 2 a.m. is Peter.’ This is a most unaccountable usage, rolling over us unstoppably. Yet when I turned to The Spectator (no relation) written by Joseph Addison for July 20, 1711, I found this: ‘The Court was sat before Sir Roger came; but notwithstanding all the Justices had taken their Places upon the Bench, they made room for the old Knight at the Head of them.’

Another source from 1700 has: ‘Being all sate down, we fell a talking.’ Later in the century Oliver Goldsmith does it: ‘They were scarcely sat down, before one of the housemaids came.’ Earlier, Shakespeare, accounted a competent author, wrote in his Lover’s Complaint: ‘Comely-distant sits he by her side;/ When he again desires her, being sat,/ Her grievance with his hearing to divide.’

Of such employment of the past participle of sit the Oxford English Dictionary remarks drily: ‘Now dialect’, and quotes one of Joseph Ramsbotham’s Lancashire Rhymes (1864): ‘At th’ eend o’ th’ day, mi wark o’ done,/ An’ quite content, aw’m sat at whoam.’ It seems that Ramsbotham (of whose life I know nothing) was one of those troublesome dialect writers who, in the manner of the narrator of C.S. Calverley’s comic poem ‘The Cock and the Bull’ , likes ‘to dock the smaller parts-o’-speech’.

The parallel construction with stood is far less popular, and remains more obviously non-standard: ‘I was stood in the road waiting for the bus.’