I still remember the first time it happened. I was standing in the foyer of the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, waiting for my friends to join me. They were driving together and running late, but one was keeping me updated. Then came the WhatsApp message:
‘We just parking.’
My toes curled; my brain freaked out.
‘Keep calm,’ I told my editorial self. ‘It was a slip of the finger. Of course she meant to type “We’re just parking”. Of course. Don’t stress.’
I did not know at that stage that this aberration was going to become insidious. The slide towards the lazy omission of the verb ‘to be’ had begun!
I mainly see this irregularity on social media. It’s rife in WhatsApp messages, because, let’s face it, a message that leaves out certain words is quicker to type and can still be understood. It’s crept in all over Facebook too, even in otherwise well-written posts.
How did this happen?
Long ago, when I was a linguistics student, I learnt that the verb ‘to be’ is very difficult for learners of English as an additional language to grasp. That’s because it’s complicated.
There are eight forms of the verb ‘to be’: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. It’s an irregular verb, which means it’s a bit special when used with different subjects and tenses, and it can be a main verb or an auxiliary verb.
So, a lot can go wrong with the verb ‘to be’!
But here’s the thing: my friend who messaged me is a first-language English speaker. So too are the many other people I’ve come across who seem to think that ‘to be’ doesn’t have to be. If a lack of proficiency in English is not the cause, where has this shift come from?
I don’t think we can blame it only on the telegram nature of social media. Here’s my attempt at understanding how this aberration came about and is gaining traction:
Phonetics
Consider the horror of ‘they’re’ getting mixed up with ‘their’. This happens because ‘they’re’ and ‘their’ sound similar. Applying that to the verb ‘to be’, ‘we’ and ‘we’re’ also sound similar. So too do ‘they’ and ‘they’re’. Could it be that people are tuning out subtle differences in sound?
It’s a gallbladder
Just as the human body can live without a gallbladder, so too can a sentence live without the verb ‘to be’ when it is used as an auxiliary verb.
Take my friend’s sentence: ‘We just parking.’
The main verb is ‘parking’. If she had written the sentence correctly, it would have been ‘We’re just parking’, in which ‘we’re’ is a contraction for ‘we are’, and ‘are’ is an auxiliary verb. But without ‘are’ as the auxiliary verb, I could still understand my friend’s message perfectly, because of the main verb, ‘parking’.
Idiosyncratic use of English
Standard English isn’t used everywhere. For example, some regional dialects of English in the United Kingdom use double negatives. As editors, we wouldn’t let those slip through in written text, unless of course we’re editing a novel with characters speaking in regional dialect! But the point is that people take language and make it their own. Not adhering to Standard English isn’t a crime.
Maintaining standards
Standard English might not be important for everyone, but it is important for editors. We should keep a beady eye out for those ‘to be’ voids in texts that we’re editing, because they are going to creep in. Only when editing will we have the opportunity to pounce upon these errors with glee! In other contexts, there’s not much we can do about it. As we’ve probably all learnt by now, preserving relationships is more important than being a Grammar Grinch!
With that in mind, and tongue in cheek, back to that awful moment in the foyer of the Baxter. I survived it and lived to write a blogpost about it. As for the culprit and me? We still friends. 😊
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you also seen this error creeping in? And do you wish you could correct it every time you see it?!
For further reading, Grammarly has a comprehensive overview of ‘to be’.
Feature picture: Unsplash
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