| 词组 | swim, swam, swum |
| 释义 | swim, swam, swum In current English, the standard past tense of swim is swam, and the standard past participle is swum: • ... the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky —Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt, 1969 • ... and we have swum naked in cold country ponds —John Cheever, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 28 Aug. 1983 Evidence in the OED shows that swam was also once in reputable use as a past participle: • Who, being shipwrecked, had swam naked to land —Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750 (OED) • The messengers ... had swam across the Elbe and the Moldau —Thomas Carlyle, German Romance, 1827 (OED) However, we have no 20th-century evidence of such use in writing. More complex is the history of swum in the past tense, as in these lines by Tennyson: • Who turn'd half-round to Psyche as she sprang To meet it, with an eye that swum in thanks—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess, 1847 (OED) Additional written evidence is hard to come by, but dialect studies have shown that swum as the past of swim was common in certain areas of the U.S.—particularly New England—until fairly recently. E. Bagby Atwood, in A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States ( 1953), noted that swum then appeared to be passing into disuse: What is particularly striking is the extent to which swum is being replaced by swam. In N. Eng. I count 57 communities where usage is clearly divided between the two forms; in 48 of these the more old-fashioned informant uses swum, the more modern swam. Whatever its present status in speech, swum has never been commonly used in writing as the past tense of swim. Our files contain only a single 20th-century example of such use: • He swum from the ship and was thrown up on the Welsh coast rocks —Cledwyn Hughes, A Wanderer in North Wales, 1949 |
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