| 词组 | had ought, hadn't ought |
| 释义 | had ought, hadn't ought Bache 1869 said that he had it on good authority that the New Englandisms had ought and hadn't ought were "making progress among us"—Bache's anonymous book was published in Philadelphia—and he therefore gave the expressions some room for disapproval. Since 1869 many schoolbooks and handbooks have taken up the cudgels against them, but apparently to little or no avail, for they are still the speech forms that they seem to have been all along. You will not find them in polished personal essays or in art criticism or even in ordinary reporting. There has been a notion from the beginning that had ought and hadn't ought are regionalisms. Linguistic surveys show that Bache was not too much off base in 1869 in calling them New Englandisms. They seem to be predominantly Northern forms, although we have seen a few anomalous examples. E. Bagby Atwood's A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States (1953) shows hadn't ought in New England, New York, northern Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, as well as in small areas of Ohio and northeastern North Carolina. The fullest account seems to be in Visser 1969. He suggests that the expressions are more common in normal coversation than the printed record would indicate, and he has a generous half page of printed citations dating from 1836 to 1964. Here are a few examples not in Visser: • "I hadn't ought to think anything." "Say 'Shouldn't think,' Landry."—Frank Norris, The Pit, 1903 • ... it's father Bedott's name, and he and mother Bedott both used to think that names had ought to go down from generation to generation —Frances Miriam Whitcher, "Hezekiah Bedott," 1855, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983 • He come to hire it just before I made up my mind that I hadn't ort to go —Marietta Holley, "A Pleasure Exertion," in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, 1888 • If you don't like people, you hadn't ought to be in politics at all —Harry S. Truman, quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking, 1973 Among the interesting anomalies are citations in Visser from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and from a couple of novels by William Faulkner. These, and the quotation from Harry Truman above, suggest that the whole story of hadn't ought and had ought is not yet known. Perhaps there will be fuller information when the volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English including H is published. The earlier American Dialect Dictionary also has a mysterious citation from Georgia. Regardless of what the schoolbooks and handbooks might say, neither had ought nor hadn't ought is wrong; they are simply regionalisms. But they are still confined to speech and fictional speech. Visser, incidentally, devotes about as much space to didn't ought and doesn't ought, which are attested in British English from Dickens to J. R. R. Tolkien, Atwood found a few examples in New England. The handbooks and schoolbooks seem not to know that these forms exist. See also ought 1, 3. |
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