I was watching one of the "court" shows on television today, and the plaintiff was a young woman who was suing her former boyfriend over money she claimed he owed her when their relationship ended. At one point in her testimony she referred to "a check he had wrote." The judge interrupted her and corrected her: "A check he had written. You're a schoolteacher?"
Yes, she was a schoolteacher.
If I were going to guess, I would say she was probably from Memphis. A second grade teacher here recently taught the class that the planets were Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, and Uranisis. Several years ago I taught at a high school where the students often laughed when the principal made grammatical errors while making announcements over the intercom.
Google has 327,000 entries for "he had wrote", compared to almost 32,000,000 for "he had written".
To my ears, "he had written" sounds natural, but I guess "he had wrote" could be in the same category as "he ain't"?
Yes, I suppose that the two might be in the same category, but I would never expect a schoolteacher to use either.
"Honey, I ain't got no sideways" ... Jessye Norman (supposedly),, but... see here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/217741.stm
Same concept?
#1: For 13 years, I was an editor at a Chicago research facility that rented out several floors of the 19-story building it owned. One of the tenants was a teachers' organization. It wasn't unusual to share an elevator with teachers, and sometimes their grammar was similar to that of the teacher I saw on television today. Memphis? Chicago? Bad grammar exists everywhere, and unfortunately even teachers seem to be using it now.
What the hell was the judge thinking? It's not part of a judge's remit to ridicule a witness's dialect!
In a preschool I worked in, the lead and assistant teachers for one of the classes put up a sign at the beginning of the year stating, "Miss X and Ms. Y welcomes you to Zzz." I kept forgetting to go rip the "s" off of the bulletin board after they had gone home each day, until another one of my coworkers did it for me.
People in general have some surprising grammar issues, and teachers are no exception.
A photo in our local paper, in November, of a young Spelling Bee winner in his classroom showed a blackboard in the background on which the teacher had written a poem entitled "Rememberance Day".
What the hell was the judge thinking? It's not part of a judge's remit to ridicule a witness's dialect!
You are evidently unfamiliar with the genre of "Court TV." The main point of it is to ridicule the participants (who have agreed, for a financial consideration, to have their small claims lawsuits settled on TV, rather than in a genuine court of law).