I saw this on a website this morning.
Problem:
The past participle is a nonsense word.
Explanation:
I was researching which way a ceiling fan should turn in the winter versus the summer when I discovered this.
The full sentence was “In the winter, you will not feel any air being blowned to you since it will be pulled up to the ceiling.”
Admittedly, seeing the past participle of the verb “blow” as B-L-O-W-N-E-D is essentially humorous, but there is instructional value in discussing this blunder.
The verb “blow” has these basic forms:
- Blow — present simple, as in “The fan at top speed can blow the dust away.”
- Blew — preterite, as in “He blew up the balloon.”
- Blown — past participle, as in “She has blown it out of proportion.”
- Blowing — present continuous, as in “The wind is not blowing.”
A common English blunder for young children and for those who are learning English as a second language is to write or say “blowed” — spelled B-L-O-W-E-D — as the preterite or past participle of the verb “blow”.
In other words, the blunder is to add E-D to the present simple form because many preterites and past participles are formed in this way. For example, the verb “form” has “formed” — spelled F-O-R-M-E-D — as its preterite and as its past participle.
Here are examples of use of the nonsense word “blowed”:
- As a preterite:
- “He blowed up at her.”
- “The wind blowed last night!”
- As a past participle:
- “She has blowed her chances.”
- “If you guys had not blowed the money in Atlantic City, you would not be begging me for a loan today.”
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “blew” — 19,800,000 matches
- “blown” — 33,100,000 matches
- “blowed” — 541,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “blew” or the correct “blown” versus the incorrect “blowed” by a ratio of 36.6-to-1 or 61.1-to-1, respectively, each of which is very good, but over a half million instances of “blowed” is nothing about which to brag.
Another blunder is to say or write “blown” as the preterite of the verb “blow”, as in “He blown it.”
I had never heard or seen the word “blowned” until today. I suppose that it would be reasonable to add E-D to the end of B-L-O-W-N, if someone believed that “blown” were the preterite — because some past participles are formed in this way.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “blown” — 33,100,000 matches
- “blowned” — 86,400 matches
This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “blown” versus the incorrect “blowned” by a ratio of 383-to-1, which is superb.
Solution:
“… you will not feel any air being blown …”