Which sentence is grammatically correct?

February 24, 2021 5:29 PM

English majors, help me out. Which is grammatically correct: 1) Good beer should always be drunk room temperature. 2) Good beer should always be drank room temperature. I’m stumped. Thanks in advance.
posted by ratherbethedevil to Writing & Language (14 answers total)

Drunk
posted by Tandem Affinity at 5:30 PM on February 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

"Good beer should always be drunk at room temperature." The "at" should be there as well, in my opinion.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 5:31 PM on February 24, 2021 [88 favorites]

drink/drank/drunk is part of the same verb class as sing/sang/sung and ring/rang/rung. I would resolve this by observing what I say if I change to talking about singing songs or ringing bells and extend that pattern to drink. However, I'm someone for whom the answer to this question is 'drunk' without second thought, so it's possible switching to songs or bells is also not clear for you.

(For the record, it's class 3--this is just trivia.)
posted by hoyland at 5:52 PM on February 24, 2021 [4 favorites]

I went to look this up in Fowler, and I got lost in Fowler-snark.
posted by ovvl at 6:25 PM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm a copy editor and I say drunk. Here's an Ngram of the phrase (in American English; you can use the drop-down menu to switch to British English, English or English Fiction if you're curious about those) which clearly shows a preference for drunk. Looks like both usages were interchangeable until about 1860, after which drunk became the winner.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:26 PM on February 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Strunk and White would say to re-word to avoid ambiguity. "Good beer should always be enjoyed at room temperature."
posted by ejs at 6:28 PM on February 24, 2021 [40 favorites]

Not an English major or a grammarian, but I'd like to suggest a re-wording to avoid the passive voice. "Always drink good beer at room temperature."
posted by S'Tella Fabula at 7:03 PM on February 24, 2021 [14 favorites]

I believe that the reason that many people tend to avoid the verb tense "drunk" is that the word also serves as an adjective.
posted by yclipse at 8:09 PM on February 24, 2021

If you're ever unsure about which verb forms are considered standard in English, you don't need to be stumped. Dictionaries provide this information for every verb (in slightly different formats depending on the dictionary).

For example, Dictionary.com's entry for drink has the following:

verb (used without object), drank [drangk] or (Nonstandard) drunk [druhngk]; drunk or, often, drank; drink·ing.

The bolded words are all the different forms of the verb. Usually the first item in the list (drank [drangk] or (Nonstandard) drunk [druhngk]) is the simple past tense. The second item in the list (drunk or, often, drank) is the "past participle" or passive form, which is what you use with "I have _____ the beer" or "the beer was ______ by me". If the past participle is the same as the simple past form, dictionaries usually don't bother listing it.

For another example, here's the entry for "see":

verb (used with object), saw, seen, see·ing.

And here's "sing":

verb (used without object), sang [sang] or, often, sung [suhng]; sung; sing·ing

So if you're not sure, you can just check the dictionary. For verbs where there's more than one common form, they'll often have usage notes when you scroll down, as seen in a comment above. Here's the note for "drink" from dictionary.com:

As with many verbs of the pattern sing, sang, sung and ring, rang, rung, there is some confusion about the forms for the past tense and past participle of drink. The historical reason for this confusion is that originally verbs of this class in Old English had a past-tense singular form in a but a past-tense plural form in u. Generally the form in a has leveled out to become the standard past-tense form: We drank our coffee. However, the past-tense form in u, though considered nonstandard, occurs often in speech: We drunk our coffee.

The standard and most frequent form of the past participle of drink in both speech and writing is drunk : Who has drunk all the milk? However, perhaps because of the association of drunk with intoxication, drank is widely used as a past participle in speech by educated persons and must be considered an alternate standard form: The tourists had drank their fill of the scenery.

Sometimes you'll hear people use forms that aren't even in the dictionary. For example, I've heard people say "He drug the couch into the room". But the dictionary entry is

verb (used with object), dragged, drag·ging

All that means is that "drug" as a past tense isn't standard - even though it is a feature of some regional dialects.
posted by trig at 10:51 PM on February 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you want grammatical your subject is being spoken about is the beer which you "would have drank" at room temperature if it were good. .
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 4:24 AM on February 25, 2021

I used Strank and White, which has divergent opinions from the commentary here. Here, "Strunk" is right.
posted by k3ninho at 5:18 AM on February 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

Like ejs, I was going to suggest an end run around the whole problem by swapping out the awkward word with something less difficult, like imbibed or consumed.
posted by merriment at 5:19 AM on February 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

“It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water.”
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I vote drunk, for what it's worth.
posted by Acey at 10:34 AM on February 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

I agree with ejs and S'Tella Fabula, and also want to note that English majors don't study grammar in college.
posted by holborne at 12:41 PM on February 25, 2021 [2 favorites]