Why Do I Really, Really Want to Say ‘Had Went’?

Interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 2018, the actor and director Jonah Hill was talking about his childhood obsession with movies. “I had ran through so many films,” he said.

In a 2017 interview also on NPR, the director Bryan Fogel talked about Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian doctor who masterminded the doping of athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympics. “What happened at Sochi he was incredibly upset about,” Fogel said, “because he had went from being a scientist, meaning his whole life is — yes, it’s doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, but he was using science to beat the system.”

'Had went' isn't new

You may see what Hill and Fogel were doing, grammatically. They were using the preterite —the simple past tense—such as “ran” and “went” instead of the past participle such as “run” and “gone.” This is by no means a new thing. Writing in 1781, John Witherspoon decried what he called “vulgarisms”: “had fell," “had rose,” “had broke,” “had threw,” and “had drew.” 

Such constructions have long flourished in the American vernacular. Joseph Whitehouse, a Virginian on the Lewis and Clark expedition, wrote in his journal, “At this run, we were met with by Robert Fields, (one of the party that had went with Captain Clark).” A line of testimony in an 1870 murder trial went, “I had a laugh as to how I had went through the arrangement.” The narrator of William Faulkner’s 1931 novella “Spotted Horses” says: “Flem had done already disappeared; he had went on to see his wife.”

Often, a double substitution is made, with the participle being used instead of the preterite. “She gone home,” or, as in the lyrics of “Frankie and Johnny,” “He done her wrong.”

In the fourth edition of The American Language, published in 1936, H.L. Mencken notes, “The substitution of the preterite for the...

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