he words, that, it could add none. It
could not enable the organs even of English speech to pronounce _burstedst,
lightedst._ It, therefore, made really short work of it, and dropping the
last syllable altogether, wrote, _burst, light_, [rather, _lit_] in the
past time and passive participle."--_Cobbett's English Gram._, 169. How
could the man who saw all this, insist on adding _st_ for the second
person, where not even the _d_ of the past tense could he articulated? Am I
to be called an innovator, because I do not like in conversation such _new_
and _unauthorized_ words as _littest, leaptest, curstest_; or a corrupter
of the language, because I do not admire in poetry such unutterable
monstrosities as, _light'dst, leap'dst, curs'dst_? The novelism, with the
corruption too, is wholly theirs who stickle for these awkward forms.

[245] "You _were_, not you _was_, for you _was_ seems to be as
ungrammatical, as you _hast_ would be. For the pronoun you being
confessedly plural, its correspondent verb ought to be plural."--_John
Burn's Gram._, 10th Ed., P. 72.

[246] Among grammarians, as well as among other writers, there is some
diversity of usage concerning the personal inflections of verbs; while
nearly all, nowadays, remove the chief occasion for any such diversity, by
denying with a fashionable bigotry the possibility of any grammatical use
of the pronoun _thou_ in a familiar style. To illustrate this, I will cite
Cooper and Wells--two modern authors who earnestly agree to account _you_
and its verb literally singular, and _thou_ altogether erroneous, in common
discourse: except that _Wells_ allows the phrase, "_If thou art_," for
"_Common style_."--_School Gram._, p. 100.

1. Cooper, improperly referring _all_ inflection of the verb to the grave
or solemn style, says: "In the colloquial or familiar style, we observe _no
change_. The same is the case in the plural number." He then proceeds thus:
"In the second person of the present of the indicative, in the _solemn
style_, the verb takes _st_ or _est_; and in the third person _th_ or
_eth_, as: _thou hast, thou lovest, thou teachest; he hath, he loveth, he
goeth_. In the colloquial or _familiar style_, the verb _does not vary_ in
the second person; and in the third person, it ends in _s_ or _es_, as: _he
loves, he teaches, he does_. The indefinite, [i. e. the preterit,] in the
second person singular of the indicative, in the _grave style_, ends in
_est_, as: _thou tau