Bent out of Shape, or Not

I look forward to Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip, which arrives every day by email, but he sometimes gets thing wrong.  Today’s entry is for bend>bent>bent, which begins as follows:

bend > bent > bent. So inflected (although on bended knee is a set phrase). Occasionally the verb gets bent out of shape—e.g.:

• “A teammate dummied a run over the ball, and then Mikacenic hit a right-footed shot—Lakeside’s first of the game—that bended [read bent] up and around Mount Rainier’s four-player wall and into the far-post side netting.” Melanie Brennan, “Girls Soccer: Lakeside Ousts Mount Rainier,” Seattle Times, 22 Nov. 1997, at B7.

As is well known among even casual observers of soccer, “bended” is the correct past tense of “bending” the ball, meaning to kick it on a curved trajectory to avoid a defender. 

As Steven Pinker explained in The Language Instinct, and in this TNR column, such a specialized form of the past tense is common in English.  He illustrates this with a similar example from sports:

Take the baseball term "to fly out," a verb that comes from the noun "pop fly." The past form is "flied," not "flew" and "flown"; no mere mortal has ever flown out to center field.

The distinction often arises when nouns are turned into verbs.  Pinker explains,

Similarly, in using the verb-from-noun "to ring the city" (form a ring around), people say "ringed," not "rang." Speakers' preference for the regular form with "-ed" shows that they tacitly keep track of the fact that the verbs came from nouns. They avoid irregular forms like "flew out" because they sense that the baseball verb "to fly" is different from the ordinary verb "to fly" (what birds do): the first is a verb based on a noun root, the second, a verb with a verb root.

“Bended” likewise comes from the noun form of “bend,” as in a “bend in the river” or the “bend of the ball’s flight,” rather than from the verb.  Thus,

The most remarkable aspect of the special status of verbs-from-nouns is that everyone feels it. I have tried out examples on hundreds of people—college students, people without college educations, children as young as 4. They all behave like good intuitive grammarians: they inflect verbs that come from nouns differently than plain old verbs. So is there anyone, anywhere, who does not grasp the principle? Yes—the language mavens. Uniformly, the style manuals bungle their explanations of "flied out" and similar lawful examples.

I would never suggest that Bryan Garner has bungled.  He is more often right than wrong by several orders of magnitude.  But in this case, he shouldn’t have gotten bent out of shape.

Comments

[anon]

But, he wasn't bending the rules. Had he, the rules would have been bended, not bent, right?

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

aka 1-20-17 12:01 PM EDT

[Jason Bent]

Does "bended" in soccer really come from the noun "bend" (as in "bend of the ball's flight") or does it actually come from the verb ("to bend the ball's typical trajectory")? I am not enough of a soccer enthusiast to know the origin, but I have more than a passing interest in the proper usage of the word bent.

[S. Lubet]

Jason Bent: I cannot answer your question other than by reference to Pinker's book, and assuming that "bended the ball" is similar to "flied out." Perhaps not, although "bended" is still the right term for a soccer kick.

Interestingly, there appears to be another Jason Bent who is a former professional soccer player: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bent

Maybe we could ask him.