1

The Cambridge dictionary reads

how dare she, you, etc.! used to express anger about something someone has done

However, the Oxford Learner's dict. offers in its section "Grammar Point" the example

You told him? How did you dare?

Shouldn't the past of the idiom formed as how dared you ?

enter image description here

tchrist
  • 134,759
GJC
  • 2,491
  • 1
    We don’t say “How swam you the English Channel?” why would we say “How dared you to say?” – ColleenV Jul 28 '21 at 20:03
  • 1
    @ColleenV Well, we also don't say "How cook you?!" when we're really amazed at someone's cooking skills, so there doesn't seem to be any reason why we would say "How dare you?!" either—and yet we do. – Tanner Swett Jul 28 '21 at 20:22
  • @TannerSwett My point is that there’s a difference between “How dare you!” and “How did you dare?” We say “How could you?! but not “How can you?” unless we’ve dropped something inferred from context. – ColleenV Jul 28 '21 at 20:25
  • 3
    I think there have been other discussions of this phrase, but it's really just a unique idiom that only exists as "How dare you?" It is more an expression of shock/anger/offense than a real question, and, as such, it doesn't have a past tense. – cruthers Jul 28 '21 at 20:43
  • @cruthers I wonder how you dared! https://books.google.es/books?id=l71GAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22I%20wonder%20how%20you%20dared%22&hl=es&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q=%22I%20wonder%20how%20you%20dared%22&f=false – GJC Jul 28 '21 at 21:20
  • 2
    @ColleenV Modal verbs don't take do support: witness how we regularly say How can/could/will/would/... you all the time. Once upon a time there was some historical confusion of tense with the present vs the past, and so the past tense was sometimes used in a present sense with this verb, so sometimes people used to write How durst you leave now? and such in the present not just the past. The OED thinks that the dared (to) VERB version is more emphatic than the durst VERB version. I dare say it doesn't strike me one way or the other myself. – tchrist Jul 28 '21 at 23:04
  • @cruthers Yes, the expression is not really a question at all. And it is not in the present tense. It can refer to the present but more often to the past. It is an expostulation or expression of outrage at something already done or begun to be done and just discovered. The is a kind of future version: "Don't you dare!". – Tuffy Jul 28 '21 at 23:37
  • It is worth noting that the OED notes the entry This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1894 ...); Google Ngrams for "he durst not,he dared not has very few examples of "durst" other than from the 19th century (and earlier). – Greybeard Jul 28 '21 at 23:38
  • It sounds a bit clunky to me (I largely agree with @cruthers that How dare you! is primarily an "exclamatory" idiomatic usage on a par with Ouch!, Phew! Yuck! Blow me down!), but there are plenty of written instances of How dared* you say that...* in *past* tense contexts. – FumbleFingers Jul 29 '21 at 12:51

3 Answers3

5

How dare he tell her!

We can’t tell because this isn’t a real example with actual surrounding context taken from published literature of some form. I can tell you that in my own idiolect, you can never put the exclamation of indignation (which is what you seem to be referencing here) into the past tense. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not inflected at all, or else it breaks it. Modals are like that, you know. How dare he tell her! stays that way. You don’t do anything to the verb dare.

If you want something to carry tense, you’d have to do it as you would other modals, by using a perfect construction, perhaps like How dare he have told her! But that sounds pretty funny, too, so I would just leave it alone. The context would make it clear.

So perhaps this isn’t the exclamation How dare you! at all, since that wouldn’t make sense in the past tense. It probably isn’t an exclamation at all, since there’s no exclamation mark. But we can’t say for sure because it’s an artificial example. It could simply be a real question asking how it is that you managed to pluck up the courage to tell him.

As to why your googling seemed to miss out on normal past-tense uses historically, there’s a good reason for that...

How durst you!

It’s of course because the past tense of dare is durst! Quoth the OED:

Pronunciation: Brit. /dɛː/, U.S. /dɛ(ə)r/
Inflections: Past tense durst /dɜːst/, dared /dɛərd/; past participle dared;

It even takes the normal contracted forms like durstn’t. For example, from The Lord of the Rings we have that form appear in this dialogue in the “Strider” chapter:

Sam and Merry got up and walked away from the fire. Frodo and Pippin remained seated in silence. Strider was watching the moonlight on the hill intently. All seemed quiet and still, but Frodo felt a cold dread creeping over his heart, now that Strider was no longer speaking. He huddled closer to the fire. At that moment Sam came running back from the edge of the dell.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said, ‘but I suddenly felt afraid. I durstn’t go outside this dell for any money; I felt that something was creeping up the slope.’

‘Did you see anything?’ asked Frodo, springing to his feet.

‘No, sir. I saw nothing, but I didn’t stop to look.’

There is no shortage of how durst you specimina for your examination. Historically how durst thou was used when we still had a second person singular pronoun and inflections.

Shakespeare uses it all over the place. Look in the Henry VI plays especially. Here from Part III:

Ha! durst the traitor breathe out so proud words?
Well I will arm me, being thus forewarn’d:
They shall have wars and pay for their presumption.
But say, is Warwick friends with Margaret?

Or here from All’s Well That Ends Well:

It shall be so: I’ll send her to my house,
Acquaint my mother with my hate to her,
And wherefore I am fled; write to the king
That which I durst not speak; his present gift
Shall furnish me to those Italian fields,
Where noble fellows strike: war is no strife
To the dark house and the detested wife.

You’ll find this used as a past subjunctive or conditional form equivalent to would dare.

My mother does not drink wine and my father durstn’t.

Into the Twenty-First Century!

The modern non-regional/rustic/literary past tense form is of course dared, as in:

  • How dared you say such a thing to her!

  • I dared not say a word.

Just like

  • How could you say such a thing to her!

  • I could not say a word.

In the present, it’s still a proper modal in negative and interrogative contexts:

  • He dare not open his mouth.

Which is very different from:

  • He does not dare to open his mouth.

But we cover that elsewhere.

tchrist
  • 134,759
  • 1
    The thing about the hobbits (with the exception of the upper class ones like the Brandybucks) is that their speech is derived from early 20C West Midlands working class dialect. This dialect, like many English dialects, retained older forms of speech which had disappeared from Standard English by Tolkein's time. That's why Derbyshire, for instance, had forms like "Didst tha sirree?" Well into the late 20C. Sam's use of "dursn't" indicates his working class origins. Other dialects corrupted it to "dosn't" but it's still the same word. – BoldBen Jul 29 '21 at 00:08
  • @BoldBen That's very much true and a great observation, even if most people alive today no longer recognize that that is precisely what Tolkien was doing by using that turn of phrase, and all the many others from Sam and such. You can see the prevailing grammar changing back around the turn of the century in this 1900 grammar book. By then, it no longer sounded right to people to use durst outside of negatives. – tchrist Jul 29 '21 at 00:25
  • where else is it covered exactly? – GJC Jul 29 '21 at 00:30
  • According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, "daren’t" is used occasionally in ordinary past time contexts Kim daren’t tell them so I had to do it myself – GJC Jul 29 '21 at 00:37
  • @GJC All over the our site. – tchrist Jul 29 '21 at 00:54
  • @GJC What's your point about CGEL that you're trying to make here? We aren't covering all the uses of dare here. You merely asked why the historical record seemed curious. – tchrist Jul 29 '21 at 00:58
  • 1
    “How dared he . . .” shows up in the 19th century in both fiction and non-fiction in Google NGram. – Xanne Jul 29 '21 at 05:21
  • Related. – tchrist Apr 22 '23 at 20:47
1

Q: Shouldn’t the past form of the idiom How dare [you]! be How dared [you]! rather than How did [you] dare!?

A: Let’s back up . . .

As an idiom, How dare [you]! is a fixed expression, a set phrase.

It doesn’t have a past version. Or, rather, the usage of a past version is considered an oddity.

Linguist Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern English Usage, calls it an exclamatory construction involving an inversion:

How dare he do that is an idiomatic phrasing of the interrogative How [does/did he] dare [to] do that?

He goes on to refer the reader to the section on the past tense dare, where he wraps up with:

It is odd, however, to see the past-tense form in the set phrase how dare you . . . Most writers and editors would insist on making [those examples] How dare you!
Source: Garner’s Modern English Usage

Sure, you can do it, but you’ll be a little lonely:

Google Ngram comparison for “how dare”

A usage comparison of how dare *, how dared *, and how did * dare. Source (enlarged and interactive): Google Books Ngram Viewer

The Corpus of Contemporary American English shows how dare PRON at a frequency of 3699 compared to how dared PRON at 10 and how did PRON dare at 7.

 

Tinfoil Hat
  • 17,008
  • Quirk's grammar reads Dare occurs (with nuclear stress) in the following idiomatic constructions expressing a threatening rebuke "How DÀRE you do such a thing?" The past tense form dared w ithout DO-support may be regarded an example of a blend, since the -ed past inflection is not characteristic of modal verbs https://www.oed.com/oed2/00057596 – GJC Jul 29 '21 at 22:51
  • How did you dare do such thing? is not a past tense version of the set exclamative of indignation How dare you do such a thing!; it’s a question. At the Garner link above, you can go back a page to the start at the entry for dare and learn everything you ever wanted to know about the verb in modal and past tense usage (according, of course, to Garner and his sources). I addressed the usage of dare only in this fixed expression. – Tinfoil Hat Jul 29 '21 at 23:20
-1

"Dare" is reckoned with in CoGEL as a marginal modal along with "need", "ought to", and "used to".

Here is what Practical English Usage (second edition p.149, No 150) says about the verb "to dare".

1 structure

Dare can be used in two ways:
a) as an ordinary verb, followed by the infinitive without to.
♦ He's a man who dares to say what he thinks.
♦ She didn't dare to tell him what happened.
b) as a modal auxiliary verb ( questions and negatives with do, third person without -s, following infinitive without to)
♦ Dare she tell him?
♦ I daren't say what I think.

In modern English dare is not a very common verb. In an informal style, people people generally use other expressions to express the same meaning.
♦ He 's not afraid to say what he thinks.

2 dare as an ordinary verb

When dare is used, it is usually as an ordinary verb, not as a modal auxiliary. It is most common in negative sentences.
♦ She doesn't dare to go out at night.
♦ The old lady didn't dare to open the door.
The expressions You dare§ (GB) and Don't you dare! are sometimes used to discourage people from doing unwanted things.
♦ *'Mummy, can I draw a picture on the wall?' Don't you dare!

3 Dare as a modal auxiliary*

Modal auxiliary forms are common in a few present-tense uses. For instance British people quite often use daren't to say that somebody is afraid to do something at the moment of speaking.
♦ I daren't look.
How dare you? is sometimes used as an indignant exclamation.
♦ How dare you? Take your hands off me at once!
And I dare say (sometimes written as I daresay) is used in British English to mean 'I think probably', 'I suppose'.
♦ I dare say it'll rain soon. ♦ I daresay you're ready for a drink.

4 mixed structures

Occasionally mixed ordinary/modal structures are found.
♦ Do you dare put your mind to the test. (advertisement)
♦ He didn't dare open his eyes. ♦ The bank dares not try to call in its debts.

5 dare + object + infinitive

Children use the expression I dare you + infinitive to challenge each other to do frightening things.
♦ I dare you to run across the road with your eyes shut.

Need can also be used both as an ordinary verb and as a modal auxiliary.

The following note in CoGEL shows more explicitly the mixed construction.

[b] Blends between the auxiliary construction and the main verb construction occur and seem to be widely acceptable (more so in the case of dare than in that of need):
♦ They do not dare ask for more. ♦ Do they dare ask for more?
These two examples combine the do-support of the main verb construction with the bare infinitive of the auxiliary construction. On the hypothesis that there are two different verbs (the main verb DARE and the auxiliary verb dare), one would expect these to be ungrammatical; but they are not. The past tense form dared without do-support may be regarded as another example of a blend, since the -ed past inflection is not characteristic of modal verbs:
♦ They dared not carry out their threat.

In "how dare she, you, etc.!" the use is modal and the meaning is not that of the main verb (have the courage to do something). This is a set expression.
In "You told him? How did you dare?" the verb is the main verb, and this means "How did you muster up the courage to do it?". This is the regular form used with main verbs, but as mixed forms are widely accepted, you also find "how dared you ?" in which "dare" is the main verb. Both forms are grammatically correct.

LPH
  • 20,841