A book I'm reading has this sentence in it:
"How dared you go and see her without me?"
Is the usage of the past tense 'dared' here grammatically wrong or just odd given the established phrase "How dare you?"
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3Er, "How durst you go and see her without me!"– F.E.Commented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:43
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I dared him to do it!– Elliott FrischCommented Mar 20, 2014 at 23:03
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The "Extra Examples " section in the entry of DARE in the Oxford Learner's dict shows I hardly dared breathe. Dare here forms its past as a (semi)modal verb, yet the position in the sentence of the adverb, hardly, is not the cannonical one after a modal and before the next main verb. Secondly, the entry shows an idiom, how dare you, "used to show that you are angry about something that somebody has done". However, the section "Grammar Point" offers the example You told him? How did you dare?. Isn't the past of the idiom formed as how dared you ?– GJCCommented Nov 19, 2020 at 11:27
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2 Answers
This seems to be a quote from Robert Gilbraith's The Cuckoo's Calling.
In the original, the 'dared's are italicised for emphasis. They refer to an event in the past. The question is repeated in shorter form immediately after, for emphasis.
If you flip the question to a statement, you'll see that, although unconventional, it's a reasonable and grammatical construction:
You dared go and see her without me.
So, I can't see a problem with it in context. You could argue it adds to the drama.
answered Mar 20, 2014 at 21:02
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If you wrote it as a statement you would be correct, but flipping it around as a question I believe invalidates that usage.– LynnCommented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:07
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@Lynn You might want to consider retracting that comment after looking at the ngram statistics for 'How dared' here: books.google.com/ngrams/… Commented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:10
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I appreciate the link but I stand by my comment. Compare the usage to "How dare" and it seems like a comparatively tiny amount of uses. I liken it to comparing: "You climbed the mountain!" and "How climbed you the mountain?" Grammatically it "should" be: "How did you climb the mountain?"– LynnCommented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:19
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2@Lynn Right, but you don't get "How climb you the mountain?" either, so you don't get "How climbed you the mountain?" But given that you do get "How dare you?" is "How dared you?" ungrammatical? Commented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:21
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@MatthewH - I was viewing it as an ellipsis of 'How did you dare'. But I would be happy to see a more authoritative grammatical reason as an answer.– LynnCommented Mar 20, 2014 at 21:24
"dare" can be used as a modal: "How dare you go there alone?" (compare with "how can you go there alone?") - "go" is the main verb
"How dared you go and see her without me?" is simply the simple past version (compare with "how could you go and see her without me?")
