Its past tense is, and always has been, led: 1500 years ago Beowulf led his men into battle.
Recently a gentleman asked me to start a campaign for the preservation of led, which is everywhere misspelt. I said I’d think about it.
I am not a campaigner. I have never protested, hoisted a placard, marched in a hikoi or waved a flag beside the road inviting motorists to honk for distant Palestine.
It is partly apathy. It is partly Voltaire’s notion that we should each concern ourselves with our own garden. But it is also fatalism.
Thomas Hardy wrote of the universe’s Immanent Will that we are powerless to affect. The iceberg and the Titanic were destined for each other. Doris Day put it more simply. "Que sera, sera", she sang.
Anyone with an interest in language is inevitably fatalist. A language is a species, and like any species it is in a constant state of flux, of mutation.
If a mutation proves advantageous, it stays. If not, not. It is a billion such mutations that have caused the barely comprehensible Old English of Beowulf to evolve into modern English.
No-one campaigned for those changes. They just happened. The language goes where it goes.
Nevertheless we all have a template of how the language should be, a sense of right and wrong usage, and that template is established in infancy. The language as we first learn it is our ideal form.
In consequence, as we age and the language changes under our feet, we feel that it has strayed from the proper path, that it is in decline.
And so, yes, I understand what the gentleman is feeling when he asks for a campaign to preserve led. And led is so simple. How hard can it be to get it right?
Very hard, would seem to be the answer, judging by the numbers who get it wrong. And the point is that if those numbers continue to swell until almost everybody gets it wrong, then wrong will cease to be wrong and will become right.
You and I may continue to insist that the past tense of to lead is led, but we will be perceived as quaintly old-fashioned — like the oldies in my youth who spelt connection with an x or show with an e.
Those oldies are dead now and their spellings with them. And one by one we will die too. Then led will be dead.
You can see how the demise of led has come about. It’s the fault of that other word lead, meaning the heavy and poisonous metal, a word that is every bit as old and honourable.
The confusion arises from the metal being spelt the same as the present tense of the verb but pronounced like its past tense.
(It is perhaps a pity that we didn’t adopt the Latin word for lead, as the French did. That word is plumbum (plomb in French) from which we get plumb line — a string with a bit of lead on the end — and also your friendly local plumber, the Romans having done much of their water reticulation via lead pipes and tanks.)
The confusion over led may not have been helped by other verbs. To read, for example, rhymes with to lead, and its past tense rhymes with led.
But, to the bewilderment of foreigners, that past tense is still spelt read. English is not an easy language.
Keith Moon may not have helped either. Moon was a drummer for The Who (the grammarian in me longs to type "for The Whom"). His specialty was doing damage to drum-kits, hotel rooms and his own physiology. He died of the drink and the drugs at the age of 32.
On one occasion the guitarist Jimmy Page suggested forming a new band and Moon remarked that such a band would go down with the public "like a lead balloon."
Nevertheless Page went ahead and formed the band. And he used Moon’s comment to name it, only he changed the balloon to a Zeppelin and the word lead to led to ensure that the band’s followers pronounced it as he meant it to be pronounced.
And given Led Zeppelin’s vast popularity, I should not be surprised to learn that its name has contributed to the confusion over the past tense of to lead.
On such small events does history turn. And there is nothing we can do about it.
Sing us out, Doris.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
