Quote:
Originally Posted by Leon
I changed the word without looking it up, from past to passed. Here is my Webster's College Dictionary in front of me. It says:
passed- v.1. to move past; go by:... 8. to go beyond a point ...
past- adj.1. gone by or elapsed time.
Actually Fred I might just stick with my original use of the word, though I would hate to debate it.  |
The internet being the source of all knowledge:
Grammar 101: get past it vs. get passed it
28 Jan 2010 3 Comments
by pant0mime in education Tags: grammar
How did you get past it? VS. How did you get passed it?
Which one is the correct sentence here? English Majors mahiya kayo if you picked the second one. Haha.
There are people who are confused with the two sentences, especially when it’s spoken because past and passed sound a bit similar. But that’s where their similarities end. The two words have very different meaning.
When you say get PAST it, the word “past” doesn’t refer to either time or tense. The closest word you could substitute it with is “by”, so you can also say, “how did you get by it?”
The whole expression means how did you recover from something or how did you deal with it.
However, how did you get passed it is so wrong on so many levels. Haha. But first, let’s take at the word “passed” and take a look what it means.
The base form pass can mean “to hand over something to someone else”, “to go through some place”, or the antonym of fail.. In this context, I believe the confusion comes from the word meaning “to go through”.
But if you’re going to mean that, the word pass should always be accompanied by the word “by”. The correct term now for the meaning “to go through” is “pass by” or “passed by” for the past tense. Eg. Did you pass by the supermarket on your way home? Saying, “Did you pass the supermarket on our way home?” is incorrect.
That being said, how did you get passed it is very confusing. I think the word “passed” in the sentence is confused to mean “to go through” but there is the missing “by”.
Suppose we say, “how did you get passed by it?”
Does it make the sentence correct?
No. Because the confusion stems from people taking the expression literally when it’s just a figure of speech.
Also, it still has two main verbs. “get passed” doesn’t make sense.