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In a song by Coldplay, Paradise, I found the sentence Away she flied. I'm Italian, and I was not sure that flied could be a form of the verb fly or some other word unknown to me. I looked it up in the online dictionaries, and I found out that it is a term used in baseball. Could somebody help me to understand the use in this song?

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This is actually just the past tense, not the past participle. The past participle is the form used with have: fly, flew, (have) flown. – Jon Purdy Jan 27 '12 at 17:00
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Most versions of the song lyrics on the web have "away she'd fly", and listening to the song, I think that's what they're singing. It does sound a little bit like "away she'd flied", but that doesn't make any sense in context, and is also ungrammatical. (The 'd here is a contraction of would.) The correct past tense "flew" is used elsewhere in the song. Most of the lyrics on the web may be wrong in that the previous line makes more sense if they're singing "she'd close her eyes", and not "she'll ...", as most versions go. – Peter Shor Jan 27 '12 at 17:18
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The lyrics on Coldplay's official site say "In the night the stormy night away she'd fly." Listening to the line on headphones, Chris Martin is singing "fly;" your hearing "flied" is probably just an artifact of his enunciation. – Gnawme Jan 27 '12 at 17:20
I'm voting to close as "general reference". It's incidental that there is a "regular" past tense "flied", since that's a baseball-specific term derived from the noun form anyway, which was nothing to do with what OP asked about. – FumbleFingers Jan 27 '12 at 17:53
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Hi Margherita. Please have a look at the following useful links: When and why is “flied” used as the past tense of “fly”? from this very site, and the excellently insightful Systematic irregularization from Language Log. – RegDwighт♦ Jan 27 '12 at 18:14
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closed as general reference by Mehper C. Palavuzlar, Will Hunting, FumbleFingers, RegDwighт♦ Jan 27 '12 at 18:15

This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

1 Answer

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The past participle of "fly" is "flew." I don't know the song, but Coldplay probably used it either because it rhymed with what they needed to, or to sound "cool."

In baseball, a "fly ball" is a ball that is hit high up into the air. Many people use "flied" to distinguish describing hitting the ball ("he flied out"; meaning someone caught his fly ball) from "he flew out," which would denote that he grew wings and left the stadium by air, though if people know you're talking about baseball, they'll probably understand what you mean.

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Here's Steven Pinker waxing eloquent on the baseball usage. When he's not writing serious stuff about linguistics, or the relevance of language to anthropology/neurology, I find he's usually writing something about baseball! – FumbleFingers Jan 27 '12 at 17:17

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