I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...
Mike C from Shropshire asks:
Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. … Any thoughts?
Pleading and plea-ing
Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is fairly particular to much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:
- He pled guilty = real but prescriptively frowned-upon
- She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
- He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
- ?? She pled for their forgiveness. =
unnatural-soundingmuch less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon
As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:
Because of this, I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.
The British history of pled
Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!
The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:
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| pled guilty in Hansard |
I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:
So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)
The American history of pled
So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants. But.
In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).
On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.
At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on.
Pled guilty in speech
I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.)
The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:
- pled guilty: 356
- pleaded guilty: 295
| UK | USA | |
| pleaded guilty | .02 | .02 |
| pled guilty | — | .07 |
Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?
It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.
- 53 were from Scotland
- 30 were from either English local news or UK national news
- 10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
- 1 Northern Irish
- 1 Wales
- 5 ?
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| pled guilty in NOW-GB |
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| pleaded guilty in NOW-GB |
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
Delete"She pled for their forgiveness" sounds completely natural to my Scottish ears.
ReplyDeleteSounds fine to my American ears as well. Both "pled" and "pleaded" are OK with me, regardless of context. I can also say that I pled with somebody, pled a prior engagement, etc.
DeleteI wouldn't have guessed that "pled" was so rare in written US English before 1960! But usage manuals had been condemning it since the mid-19th century, so it must have been around in speech already.
Thanks for these comments: I've updated the post in reaction.
DeleteMy English is largely influenced by Welsh, then a hefty dose of South of England as an older child, then various long stints across different parts of the North of England as an adult. It's hard to be sure of course, but I plead, I pled sounds completely natural me, and I think it's what I've always said. There isn't any Scottish ancestry in my family to influence it. It's possibly I picked it up at university, that's 40+ years ago now, and I was friends with a lot of Scots there, it could have bled into my speech then I guess?
ReplyDeleteIt could have come from many places, including just the intuition that it sounds better—because of the other -ead verbs with this pattern.
DeleteRobert Mueller consistently used pled. Allegedly it's a marker of insiders of the Department of Justice, like saying "nookular" marking insiders of the Department of Defense.
ReplyDeleteInteresting!
DeleteWait, I probably confused things: the DoJ insider thing is addressing the attorney general as "General".
DeleteBut, yes, consistently pled by Mueller.
The “No gavels please, we’re British” piece referenced here points out that, legally, Britain has no jails/gaols — only prisons. But their conclusion is perplexing:
ReplyDelete> Yet 154 years later the term persists, in what I unscientifically suspect is a combination of American linguistic influence and its usefulness to headline writers, who value the four-letter word’s economy of space.
The idea is seemingly that, in spite of “jail”/“gaol” being with us since Middle English, the simple fact of its legal-technical discontinuation oughta be enough to banish it from the language — if not for those pesky Americans and headline-writers (or, god forbid, American headline-writers!).
Does language not *really* exist outside of legal documents? That is: it does exist Out There, but perhaps only as an ersatz? I guess we’ll never know, unless a court out there somewhere makes a ruling.
My thoughts exactly, I see the people fall into the same mindset with the scientific (re)definition of words. Whales used to be considered fish until taxonomists decided for the rest of us that we're wrong. Sorry Blackfish, you're an Orca now.
DeleteMaybe they were getting a BIT loose with the term when the Catholic church decided that Capybara were fish, though.
great points!
DeleteWhoever wrote that article also seems to think that in America a private citizen can choose to file criminal charges against a suspect. In reality it's just like the UK, where prosecutors decide whether or not charges are filed. So while the phrase "press charges" might very well be an Americanism, the concept doesn't seem to have anything to do with the US legal system specifically.
DeleteIncidentally, Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol dates from 1898.
Delete@anonymous I came here to mention that too. It's something that's been bothering me since I first saw that same Law Society article years ago.
DeleteI think it's just a lay-speaker-versus-professional jargon issue that the society confused with a US/UK dialectal difference.
I would have spelt pled as plead, same way that lead can be pronounced 2 different ways with different meanings. I understand that that makes it almost impossible to search however.
ReplyDeleteInteresting!
ReplyDeleteI think it depends a bit on context. I would have to write "She pleaded with him not to be angry"; I would probably write "'Please don't be angry,' she pleaded", but could use "pled" there. And I could definitely write "In court, he pled guilty to the offence," although to my British ears, "pleaded" works even better! Oh, the English language is weird and wonderful.....
ReplyDeleteSorry to be a bit of a nitpicker, but I don't understand how the "Scottish parliament published the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995" could have happened when the Scottish parliament didn't exist until 1999? Fascinating article overall though.
ReplyDeleteThanks—I got it the laws the Scottish Parliamentary website, so that had led me to conclude they were from the Scottish Parliament. But I've removed that reference now, thanks.
DeleteI'd probably use 'pled' for a legal plea but 'pleaded' for anything else (I'm from southern England). In that case (so to speak) 'pled' is the past tense of 'to enter a plea' while the past tense of 'to plead' is 'pleaded.'
ReplyDeleteYes same, although I wouldn’t bat an eye at ‘pleaded guilty’ either, whereas ‘she pled with him’ sounds wrong. ‘She pled/pleaded for forgiveness’ though - both work. I’m from south of England too but spent 15 years living in Scotland so that has probably left them as more or less interchangeable for me. So much do that I couldn’t say I’d even noticed the use of ‘pled’ on TV before reading this article.
DeleteI thought I should mention for the sake of balance that to my ears (originally northern English, now southern English), 'pled' sounds and looks pretty strange.
ReplyDeleteBrEnglish 70+ male and retired lawyer. 'Pled' sounds odd to me in all contexts. Of other legal terms, no, we do not use gavels here. That is what auctioneers do, but it is normally referred to as a hammer, as in the phrase 'go under the hammer'. A US phrase that journalists and other media people have picked up from films etc., but which still really jars with me is referring to witnesses 'taking the stand'. They don't. If there is a specific place for witnesses to give evidence from, it's the 'box'.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I have never heard of an Orca being referred to as a 'Blackfish'. Until recently, here, they were 'Killer Whales', a term that one still hears but which is slightly out of flavour. Normal usage in my experience no more regards a cetacean as a fish, than it does a seal or an otter.
Off topic slightly, but I've redd the word 'pled' so many times in the last few minutes that it's gone funny on me and I can no longer accept that it is a word at all. Is there a name for that phenomenon?
ReplyDeleteOkay, my pal Iain Ternet reckons it's called 'semantic satiation'. Sorry to have troubled you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
DeleteIs it possible that pled is gaining in popularity in part because it is a shorter word than pleaded? Americans have a long history of simplifying words and spelling. Media from newspaper to movie scripts will often choose a shorter word over a longer one, especially one like pled that has no other interpretation.
ReplyDeleteAs a Scot in America, perhaps it’s no surprise that both sound fine to me. Learning about the history and evolution of words in English helps me to understand how my own use of language is changing over time.
In the Prodigal Tongue there is (if I’m remembering correctly) a table that undermines that stereotype
ReplyDeleteIn the Prodigal Tongue there is (if I’m remembering correctly) a table that undermines that stereotype
ReplyDeleteI'm seeing more and more in writing "lead" instead of "led" and "plead" instead of "pleaded" or "pled". I assume in analogy with "read/read" (present/past tense). Ugh
ReplyDelete