To mourn the loss of the word 'sitting' from English?

[UngratefulMoo]

No one seems to use it these days. It's all, 'I was sat there', 'She was sat down'.... well, no, unless you were forcibly put there or instructed to sit by someone else, I think you'll find you were 'sitting' there.

Where has the word sitting gone, and am I alone, or unreasonable in pining for it?

Yanbu OP. My partner was a newspaper editor and resorted to writing the sat/sitting, stood/standing rules on the whiteboard.

Every time I see "was sat" in the Daily Mail on line I always add a comment against it and suggest they limit their graduate recruitment solely to people from private schools or RG universities to avoid this kind of bad grammar. I never see it in the Times and FT by the way.

sat and sitting is a tense thing isn't it? I thought sat was a past participle of sit, although my english teacher was crap and never did explain that stuff.

www.writingenglish.com/cverbs/sit.htm

I would sat talking about a past event I think, sitting current.

But son't get me started on the use of "was" and "wasn't" instead of "were" and "weren't". As for "yous"...

The "I was sat" was a real northernism, and an acceptable variant, though not in formal writing when I were a lass, but has probably spread.

When I begin teaching in London in the late 70s, no-one, but no-one said or wrote "should of", and not because they were fabulously literate. It just didn't exist.

Our farming neighbours when I was growing up used 'I was sut' (pronounced 'soot'). North-West England. Hope that helps. Probably not. But it could be coming to a street near you...

I always thought it was a northernism too (originally) but I think it's now being used so much in the media that young people in particular have picked it up and it's spreading.

I'm in Scotland and hear 'I have went' all the time

I was sat isn't correct in any way, shape or form

Yes it is.

www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/ask_about_english/071231/

Yes, I think "non-standard" is what we should be using here!

Oh OP YADNBU!

I remember having a big todo about this with a fellow cabin crew member.
We were working on a particularly busy flight where there were lots of seating/tv screen problems.
Every time a passenger (all foreign nationals) came into the galley to inform us of their complaint she would ask ' where are you sat?' only to be met with a puzzled face and no verbal answer.
She then proceed to repeat the same sentence only getting louder and louder each time until she became exasperated, followed bt lots of irritated mutterings about 'these people not being able to understand basic English'

I politely pointed out to her that to people who had learnt English properly, her wording would make no sense to them at all.
Well, she wouldn't have it and told me I was being ridiculous and stubbornly continued with this strange turn of phrase until the end of the flight, by which time she looked completely frazzled and almost headed for some kind of unnecessary breakdown...very strange!

On a similar note, has anyone else noticed people using 'yourself' instead of 'you'! Lots of girls I work with use this and it is so annoying! Oh and 'is' instead of 'are', though that is just bad grammar I suppose.

Actually now I think about it she could have saved herself a lot of stress if she had just asked ' what's your seat number please?'

I rarely hear sat instead of sitting here, but the "yourself" thing drives me bonkers. The estate agent we were dealing with a few months ago kept writing things like "I'll wait to hear back from yourselves" in emails. So annoying.

It's merely an example of poor English. The correct usage is not dead.

It's an example of spoken dialect.

Written down, except in reported speech, yes it is grammatically incorrect.

But it's a dialect.

BTW.

I have a good degree from an excellent University, am pedantic about grammar. But I still use 'was sat' because I come from Essex. I would never write it, though.

Yanbu it sounds very uneducated.

I was at a meeting in a primary school a few weeks ago and it had a display board saying:

I sat, but never I was sat.

I stood, but never I was stood.

I lay, but never I was laying.

And other such sentences. It made me happy.

Embarrassingly though, my DP did have to point out how to use it correctly to me when we first met! It's incredible how lazy we can be with the English language.

I also used to frequently get mixed up with "I" or "me" when saying you and I etc. Which I'm ashamed of, but happy I've corrected!

Any entrenched grammatical mistake could be considered a dialect.

Indeed Shit some of us don't even like "to frequently get", but I accept that people have different views on split infinitives.....

The main this is that we ensure iour teenagers know that speaking in particular ways will have certain consequences so they then make an active choice. A lot of interviews these days are undertaken first by telephone, not least to assess how people speak where the role involves talking to customers.

My teenager's current bugbear is a Sky advertisements where the Sky person says "haitch" not aitch. Perhaps Sky find they make more money if they adopt the pronunciation of many of their subscribers.

It was never a 'northern thing' when I was being brought up. I thought it as a Suffolk thing when I moved there in the '80s, but now hear it everywhere.

Indeed Shit some of us don't even like "to frequently get", but I accept that people have different views on split infinitives.....

Split infinitives are in many cases more elegant than the alternative.