though BAD GRAMMAR.  To say, ‘You are a man.’ is NOT GRAMMATICAL LANGUAGE; the word you having reference to a plural noun only.  It should be, ’Thou art a man.’”—­Wright’s Philosoph.  Gram., p. 55.  This author, like Lindley Murray and many others, continually calls himself WE; and it is probable, that neither he, nor any one of his sixty reverend commenders, dares address any man otherwise than by the above-mentioned “BAD GRAMMAR!”

[244] “We are always given to cut our words short; and, with very few exceptions, you find people writing lov’d, mov’d, walk’d; instead of loved, moved, walked. They wish to make the pen correspond with the tongue. From lov’d, mov’d, walk’d, it is very easy to slide into lovt, movt, walkt. And this has been the case with regard to curst, dealt, dwelt, leapt, helpt, and many others in the last inserted list.  It is just as proper to say jumpt, as it is to say leapt; and just as proper to say walkt as either; and thus we might go on till the orthography of the whole language were changed.  When the love of contraction came to operate on such verbs as to burst and to light, it found such a clump of consonants already at the end of the words, that, it could add none.  It could not enable the organs even of English speech to pronounce burstedst, lightedst. It, therefore, made really short work of it, and dropping the last syllable altogether, wrote, burst, light, [rather, lit] in the past time and passive participle.”—­Cobbett’s English Gram., 169.  How could the man who saw all this, insist on adding st for the second person, where not even the d of the past tense could he articulated?  Am I to be called an innovator, because I do not like in conversation such new and unauthorized words as littest, leaptest, curstest; or a corrupter of the language, because I do not admire in poetry such unutterable monstrosities as, light’dst, leap’dst, curs’dst?  The novelism, with the corruption too, is wholly theirs who stickle for these awkward forms.

[245] “You were, not you was, for you was seems to be as ungrammatical, as you hast would be.  For the pronoun you being confessedly plural, its correspondent verb ought to be plural.”—­John Burn’s Gram., 10th Ed., P. 72.

[246] Among grammarians, as well as among other writers, there is some diversity of usage concerning the personal inflections of verbs; while nearly all, nowadays, remove the chief occasion for any such diversity, by denying with a fashionable bigotry the possibility of any grammatical use of the pronoun thou in a familiar style.  To illustrate this, I will cite Cooper and Wells—­two modern authors who earnestly agree to account you and its verb literally singular, and thou altogether erroneous, in common discourse:  except that Wells allows the phrase, “If thou art,” for “Common style.”—­School Gram., p. 100.