In "I have /got/ the measles" /got/ is historically a sort of auxiliary of /have/, and in colloquial American, as we have seen in the examples just given, the auxiliary has obliterated the verb. /To have/, as an auxiliary, probably because of its intimate relationship with the perfect tenses, is under heavy pressure, and [Pg207] promises to disappear from the situations in which it is still used. I have heard /was/ used in place of it, as in "before the Elks /was/ come here."[49] Sometimes it is confused ignorantly with a distinct /of/, as in "she would /of/ drove," and "I would /of/ gave." More often it is shaded to a sort of particle, attached to the verb as an inflection, as in "he would '/a/ tole you," and "who could '/a/ took it?" But this is not all. Having degenerated to such forms, it is now employed as a sort of auxiliary to itself, in the subjunctive, as in "if you had /of/ went," "if it had /of/ been hard," and "if I had /of/ had."[50] I have encountered some rather astonishing examples of this doubling of the auxiliary: one appears in "I wouldn't had '/a/ went." Here, however, the /a/ may belong partly to /had/ and partly to /went/; such forms as /a-going/ are very common in American. But in the other cases, and in such forms as "I had '/a/ wanted," it clearly belongs to /had/. Sometimes for syntactical reasons, the degenerated form of /have/ is put before /had/ instead of after it, as in "I could /of/ had her if I had /of/ wanted to."[51] Meanwhile, /to have/, ceasing to be an auxiliary, becomes a general verb indicating compulsion. Here it promises to displace /must/. The American seldom says "I /must/ go"; he almost invariably says "I /have/ to go," or "I /have got/ to go," in which last case, as we have seen, /got/ is the auxiliary.
The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are shown in the following paradigm of /to bite/:
/Present/ I bite /Past Perfect/ I had of bit /Present Perfect/ I have bit /Future/ I will bite /Past/ I bitten /Future Perfect/ (wanting)
/Present/ If I bite /Past Perfect/ If I had of bit /Past/ If I bitten
/Present/ I can bite /Past/ I could bite /Present Perfect/ (wanting) /Past Perfect/ I could of bit
/Present/ I am bit /Past Perfect/ I had been bit /Present Perfect/ I been bit /Future/ I will be bit /Past/ I was bit /Future Perfect/ (wanting)