To learn about fifteenth-century hygiene, she forwent showers for a week and brushed her teeth with powdered cuttlefish bone.Forwent? For real? Google had 137K hits for "forwent" (and 120K for "forewent"), 143K for "foregoed," and a whopping 967K for "chose to forego," which I'd employ rather than either of the prior formulations. (Ngram prefers forwent.)
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
ALOTT5MA GRAMMAR RODEO: BONUS WEDNESDAY EDITION: A profile of popular British historian Lucy Worsley in the current New Yorker contains the following sentence:
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Forwent would not have occurred to me, but I think I love it.
ReplyDeleteForwent. I am pretty sure it is not right, but I wish it were.
ReplyDeleteabstained from
ReplyDeleteforegot showers?
ReplyDeleteEschewed. Forwent is totally unnecessary here -- the futurist "fore-" has nothing to do with the point of the sentence.
ReplyDelete"continued her normal course of daily".
ReplyDeleteReal word. Proper past tense of forgo. Old English rules getting in the way again. Forgone also works, but has different connotations in modern English. The for- and fore- are essentially the same.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I'd avoid the awkwardness and go with eschew, refrain, abstain, went without, or something less archaic (unless the greater context calls for it).
I'm with Isaac -- forewent is a great word. "By the end of Lent, I will have forewent red meat entirely" is fine.
ReplyDelete"Forwent" sounds like the kind of word Gwyneth Paltrow would use whilst talking about her encounter with the delightful William Joel.
ReplyDeleteIf the past tense of "go" is "went," then the past tense of "forego" is "forewent." English grammatical rules rarely make sense - do you really want to be messing around with the few things that ARE logical?
ReplyDeleteExcept you're not using it correctly. Go is to went is to gone, as forego is to forewent is to foregone. So right now you are intending to forego meat entirely, therefore at the end of lent you will have foregone red meat entirely, and at the end of lent, you will be able to say that you forewent meat entirely.
ReplyDeleteIt's like they used old english to talk about old england! WOOOOAAAAAHHHH!
ReplyDeleteIf William Joel is the same dude, how is he delightful?
ReplyDeleteWas he there to give Coldplay some piano lessons, becuase he needs some.
I forewent thinking that through and stand corrected.
ReplyDeleteI JUST had this conversation with someone this weekend. I went to a different tense and said, "I chose to forego"
ReplyDeleteI get that the word just means "to go without," but Dictionary.com tells me that the etymological meaning was "to go before," and that the current version somehow mutated from Shakespeare's "foregone conclusion," which only meant that the conclusion forewent, in the sense that it was decided before being considered. So I don't know how, etymologically, forego got from "to go before" to "to go without." It is now a different word, and the "go" in it is not the freestanding "go" that we know and love. Which means that there is no good reason why the past tense should be "forewent." It could just as easily be "forgoed." Either sounds weird, though, and I'm going to stick to my guns and say that the word is weird just because the futurist "fore-" is in tension with the past tense "went." If the word were more familiar (e.g. forgot) or were used to describe a past act of future intent (forewarned, forearmed, fortold, forbade, forswore), then I would be okay with it. Since it is unfamiliar, the conjunction of the two just sounds weird.
ReplyDeleteYes. This is the correct answer.
ReplyDelete