I was enchanted,
and said:
"Now, doctor, that is something LIKE! Chickens are the ticket,
there is no doubt about it. What is the next squad?"
"The Imperfect."
"How does it go?"
"IO AVENA, I had, TU AVEVI, thou hadst, EGLI AVENA, he had,
NOI AV--"
"Wait--we've just HAD the hads. What are you giving me?"
"But this is another breed."
"What do we want of another breed? Isn't one breed enough?
HAD is HAD, and your tricking it out in a fresh way of spelling
isn't going to make it any hadder than it was before; now you know
that yourself."
"But there is a distinction--they are not just the same Hads."
"How do you make it out?"
"Well, you use that first Had when you are referring to something
that happened at a named and sharp and perfectly definite moment;
you use the other when the thing happened at a vaguely defined time
and in a more prolonged and indefinitely continuous way."
"Why, doctor, it is pure nonsense; you know it yourself. Look here:
If I have had a had, or have wanted to have had a had, or was in a
position right then and there to have had a had that hadn't had any chance
to go out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets
one Had go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but
restricts the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions,
and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time,
and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise,
and all that sort of thing, why--why, the inhumanity of it is enough,
let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing
consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering
the place for nothing.
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