FOUR WAYS TO TALK ABOUT WHERE YOUR BOTTOM WAS IN THE PAST

I sit.

You sit.

He sits.

We sit.

They sit.

That’s what happens in the present tense. We take our behinds and place them on all manner of things from sofas to thrones, from cardboard boxes to advisory boards. Each version of sitting in the present is ‘sit’ except for he, she, it, and (for the Queen) one, when it’s got an S on the end.

It’s the same for standing.

I stand.

You stand.

She stands.

We stand.

They stand.

He, she, it, and the Queen stands; the rest of us stand. It’s only proper after all.

I know this is obvious. You learned this early, so did I. Stick with me though...

In the past, things are simpler still.

I sat.

You sat.

One sat.

We sat.

They sat.

See? No S on the end, even for Her Majesty. Same rules for standing in the simple past tense of course:

I stood.

You stood.

She stood.

We stood.

They stood.

So far, the rules are quite straightforward then. You stand up after you sat down. You stood up when the music played.

There are other forms of the past though, aren’t there? 

There’s what we call the past continuous - for things we were doing over a longer period of time.

• I was sitting.
• You were standing.

Then there’s the past perfect - for things we did once, and then stopped doing, usually because something else was about to happen.

• She had stood up.
• He had sat down.

And then finally, there’s the tense for things we were doing over a period of time, and then stopped doing: the past perfect continuous.

• They had been sitting there, but I had been standing.

So there are four ways to talk about where your bottom was in the past:

• I sat on the chair (simple)
• You were sitting on the carpet (past continuous)
• She had sat on the throne (past perfect)
• We had been standing in the wrong place (past perfect continuous)

So where, tell me, is the form, “I was sat”?

It doesn’t make any sense does it? Where did it come from? How did it make its way into the language, this hybrid of the past tenses? You hear it all the time:

• "So, I was sat at the bus stop when…"
• "Were you stood by the bus stop the whole time?"
• "Don’t tell me the actual Queen was sat on the throne when you barged in!"

Well. I’m guilty of it too. I listened back to a couple of talks I did and yes, I heard myself use this peculiar construction to describe where I had been sitting in a funny (it wasn't that funny) anecdote.

Here’s my theory:

It’s a British thing that’s been woven into our tendency to be awkward, bashful, and polite. We distance ourselves from saying things directly; we use the passive voice to talk about things that happened to us, rather than the active voice to talk about things that we actually did.

That’s led to some ambiguity then about who actually did the standing and the sitting when it comes to ourselves. Let me explain.

It’s dinner time and in my impatience I’ve been playing around with my cutlery at the table. I’ve taken a fork and balanced it against a wine glass, right in the centre of the table. Then my Mum comes out with the main course and sees the artful arrangement.

“Who stood that fork up against that wine glass?” she asks, crossly. I immediately get to my feet to reach across the table.

So there you go. Not only have I stood up, I’ve also stood the fork against the wine glass. Hopefully, you can see that the same verb here is being used in two different ways.

We're out on the town one night and we spy a lone traffic cone, right next to a statue of King Edward VII. He needs cheering up we think, so my friends and I give each other a boost-up, and then, rather neatly, my nimble pal scrambles up his majesty’s torso, and sits the traffic cone squarely on his head! Then we scarper.

Here, we’ve used the verb to sit in the same active and transitive way: we’ve done the sitting to something else. The fork and the traffic cones are both objects of the verb, where we (the instigators of the pranks) are clearly the subjects. In other words:

• I [stand] the fork against the glass.
• My friend [sits] the cone on the statue.
• The Subject [verbs] an object.

But when you do a thing to yourself, you are both the subject and the object. So when you sit yourself down at the table, or stand yourself on the plinth, you’re using the verb reflexively. You are the object of your own actions. And being British, we like to distance ourselves from directness about us, preferring to think of ourselves as object of an action, rather than the instigator.

Who was sat down? = who sat themselves down and is now the result of the action of sitting?

We were stood by the door = we had stood ourselves by the door and we were then positioned by the door, by ourselves.

I can’t help thinking it’s much easier just to be direct about it, to ask who had been sat down, or was standing by the door. I know a lot of people don’t care about subtle differences like this - sure, I probably will do it all again myself!

Perhaps even English is evolving to accommodate this widespread mangle of tenses! That’s okay if it is - it’s always a mistake to try to keep this beautiful language static. It flows like the Thames, twisting and turning through the ages - and you can’t freeze it over.

What I like is the subtlety of our nature that grammatical foibles like this illuminate. What is the thing that makes us talk like this, when Americans, or South Africans, or Australians just don’t use the same construction?

We are people who embarrass easily about where we stood, where we were sitting, and where we had been standing, and so of course we subconsciously think of ourselves having been put in those positions by someone else! Listen out for it. Next time you hear it, ask yourself what kind of situation the person who said it was in, and how they felt at the time. I think it’s really interesting.

And when you hear me do it, you pull me up on it! Even if it's common-usage-correct now to say 'I was stood' or 'I was sat', I absolutely want to make sure my bottom is in the right place.