Eggcorn Forum

I read the same story as a teenager—I think it may have been in the form of a cartoon strip, with a little kid saying, “But I am being have!” Anyhow, I tried googling “I am being have” and got a number of hits—most of them from parents recounting amazing things said by their kids. A LInguist List post from 1992 with a couple of such stories is here: http://linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-663.html

The story of the kid who says “I am being have” also turns up in books. Books.google.com has 11 hits for it right now, most of them quite recent (there’s one listed as being from 1944, but it’s from a serial and therefore untrustworthy). The earliest reference I’ve been able to find in print is from an article by Clifford H. Prator in the journal TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jun., 1969), pp. 95-104. I’m betting there are earlier references out there somewhere.

DavidTuggy wrote:

Where would the -ed come from in “being haved”? The proper past tense would be “I beed have”, not “I be haved”...

Actually, the past tense would be “I was haved.”

One can hear behave as two words: the actual verb be plus a previously unattested but thoroughly plausible *have (not to be confused with the verb have, which is pronounced differently).

If this is compared to phrases like being good, being careful etc., we would expect being have (without -ed).

“Being haved” sounds like a passive, on comparison with “being watched” or “being punished.” This makes me suspect that the past-participle (-ed marked) forms are either care-givers recollections or jokes, rather than accurate transcriptions of kid’s reshapings.

I thought to compare “being haved” versus “being have”, but a Google search for the latter seems to return at least as many instances of the (actual) verb have as the (nonce) adjective have.

Howstuffworks “How many senses does a human being have?”
http://health.howstuffworks.com/question242.htm

nilep wrote:
DavidTuggy wrote:
Where would the -ed come from in “being haved”? The proper past tense would be “I beed have”, not “I be haved”...
.
Actually, the past tense would be “I was haved.”

Many speakers, especially children, have developed independently a system with two verbs to be. One of them means “act” and can be used in the imperative — be have fits that pattern. The other means something more like “undergo” and cannot easily be used in the imperative. The past tense was goes with the “undergo” meaning. Thus you do not command someone to * be tired, and the past tense for I am tired is (or at least may be) I was tired, but you do command them to be quiet, and the past tense for I am being quiet is I beed quiet. You also get If he bees quiet but not * if he bees tired. [Cf. if I be quiet (will you give me a candy?) vs. * if I be tired (will you give me a candy?) .]

When I said that the proper past tense would be “I beed have”, I meant “proper” tongue-in-cheek as a reference to that non-standard active verb. You are of course right that in standard English you would say I was quiet/tired/(have).

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-15 20:28:47)

I guess I was assuming the child would rehearse the construction and use it repeatedly, that it would in fact be standard for him/her.

But you are right, that if the situation is viewed from the child’s point of view it is more likely to be a nonce construction than it is from our point of view as investigators.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-16 10:08:43)

Thanks Chad, I completely missed the past-participle aspect. Though, I do have at least 99% confidence in the validity of the transcription of her exclamation; “I’m being haved! [ca. 1990]” Oddly enough, my memory of exactly what I said immediately prior to her exclamation is markedly fuzzier, since I rarely say anything exceptional. Of coarse it’s hard for us to put our big feet into her little shoes, but do you think it’s also possible that she meant to say, “I was being haved,” in reference to her preceding behavior?

Also Chad, it seems like the google search engine’s handling of word delimiters in the search key field can be a bit ‘loosey goosey’ at times; but there must be a method to their lexical parsing madness. Without resorting to advanced google search options, I took the liberty of attempting to reverse engineer the problematic query keys you mentioned (in post #4 above). For my quick experiment, google supplied the following data: ghits( “I am being have ” ) = 40; ghits( “I’m being have ” ) = 19. Note the trailing space character that I included inside the quotes. To my surprise, this worked even better than expected by returning hits with differing punctuation characters (such as dot, bang and nathan) substituted for the trailing space character of the search key. You might want to give it a try.

Pat, your expert digging jogged me to recall that Art Linkletter (yes, he’s still kicking!) could have a riot with this one. Come to think of it, there might be some juicy eggcorn candidates waiting to be mined from his books and TV transcripts (ref. “Kids Say the Darndest Things”), nonces notwithstanding.

David and jorkel, I overlooked the nonce or nonsense word aspect as well. I see your point and now have a slightly better understanding of what an eggcorn isn’t. I did have an interesting ride and learned about much more than eggcorns in the process, though. Thanks again everybody.

David, thanks for pointing out my coarse-ness. Whoops! Hopefully, my writing has a little more polish when I’m a wake and a lert.