#1082 Current Words

We all know that it’s hard to keep current with our changing language. But we expect certain institutions, like, um, newspapers, to follow the rules we learned in school. Particularly when it comes to tenses.
You remember—present tense, past tense, and the always annoying perfect tenses, past, present and future. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost my grasp of which is named what, but I’ve been able to maintain my usage intact.
So I’m pretty sure about how things go with the verb “go.”
You go. You went. You have gone. He goes. He went. He has gone.
But our esteemed local newspaper, in the headline of an editorial, actually went off the deep end grammatically. They were applauding our local transit organization, which went far in their dedication to service. The headline read: “Intercity Transit Has Went A Long Way To Encourage Mass Transit.”
Now maybe they know something I don’t, like where to hire a headline writer with little regard for convention. And truth be told, my grammar-checker in my Word program has went and ignored putting a squiggly green line under it. But I’m still sure it is, was, and will be wrong.
It’s certainly not elegant. Like the speaker I heard the other day. She was talking about water rights, and how difficult it is to build consensus among conflicting players, and used the phrase: “As you might imagine, there’s misalignment between multiple interests.” What a lovely and delicate way to describe disagreement.
Later I asked if the sale of water rights was viewed as transferring a liquid asset. An example of how slippery words can be.
Like when I was talking with Roxy DJ Kris Marshall, and he was telling me about this new current checker his dad had. “You don’t even have to stick a wire in,” he said. “You can hold it close to what you’re checking and an LED light will come on, and it’ll make a little buzzing sound.”
I said, “Wow, my current checker is really out of date.”
Has this pun went too far?
America, ya gotta love it.