Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have two follow-ups to recent shows, and then we'll talk about archaic words that persist in modern phrases.

A couple of weeks ago, I missed an incorrect use of the word hung when I was editing an episode that mentioned Guy Fox being hanged for treason, instead saying he was hung for treason.

So we'll start today by going over the proper use in case I confused people.

The standard quip is that curtains are hung and people are hanged. It's not quite that cut and dried.

Some of my reference books say hung isn't wrong, just less customary when referring to past

executions. And the random house unabridged dictionary says that

hung is becoming more common, but the majority of my books agree that the standard English past tense

of hang is hanged when you're talking about dangling people or animals from a rope, and in other cases, it's hung.

It always seemed odd to me that there would be two past tense forms of the word hang that differ

depending on their meaning. So I did a little research and found out that in old English,

there were two different words for Hang,

Hohn and Hungian. And the entanglement of these words, plus an old Norse word, hangian,

is responsible for there being two past tense forms of the word hang today. The two past tense

forms seem to have coexisted in English

for a while with some regional differences, Hung being more common in northern England, for example.

Hung eventually became the dominant past tense form everywhere, except in legal uses, talking about

hangings, which is a relatively common

thing. The language of the law tends to change much slower than most other types of language.

So that's how we ended up with two different forms. Today, Garner's modern English usage

says that using hung for hanged is at stage three on his

language change index, which he describes as widespread.

The form becomes commonplace, even among many well-educated people, but is still avoided

...