Shu and I were at an antique store awhile ago and picked up a 1939 copy of a magazine called Physical Culture. It is so fun to read! For example, there are pictures of two women in non-scanty bathing suits. One is a little chunky and the other looks quite like our models look today. Yet the ad is for "Skinny? Thousands gain 10-25 pounds this quick and easy way!"

Now to get to the point...there is an ad for a "remarkable" invention by Sherwin Cody that has "...enabled more than 100,000 people to correct their mistakes in English. Only 15 minutes a day required to improve your speech and writing." I'd love to order it, but that's not possible! Anywho...here is one of the dastardly mistakes they cite: "Many persons say, 'Did you hear from him today?' They should say, 'Have you heard from him today?'" Is "Did you hear from him today" really wrong? It seems right to me. Am I missing something?

Of course it's not wrong. You should know by now that we're mostly descriptivists here.

I am not really surprised that some people might have thought it was wrong in the 1930s, though. The language has changed a lot since then. There are lots of innocuous phrases used now that some prescriptivist at some time hailed as a sign of the Death of English.

What's the reason, though, that it's wrong? Usually I can figure that out (like ending a sentence with a preposition or splitting infinitives), but I can't here.

I wonder, too, what the rationale is for declaring the sentence to be "wrong." I haven't found any explanation for it, though I did find this Wikipedia article on Sherwin Cody, and this one on Edwin Battistella. Edwin Battistella, a linguist, wrote a book, Do You Make These Mistakes in English? The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous School. Perhaps he answers the question. I found this statement about Battistella intriguing:

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In 1986, he served as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union, in a Federal Court case in which a trucker challenged an Alabama state statute prohibiting the public display of “any bumper sticker, sign or writing which depicts obscene language descriptive of sexual or excretory activities."

"Many persons say, 'Did you hear from him today?' They should say, 'Have you heard from him today?'" Is "Did you hear from him today" really wrong? It seems right to me. Am I missing something?

I see no reason except for personal preference. (BTW, I see no reason in the ending a sentence with a preposition either, but then maybe that's just me.)

There is nothing grammatically wrong with the first variant. Perhaps Mr (1939) Cody had some bug up his hobbyhorse believing that one construction was more "logical" than the other. I say it's bad enough getting your usage advice from the likes of Lynne Truss and her ilk, but not somebody from some forgotten magazine of the depression era.

I am going to guess that the objection has something to do with perceived meanings of various moods, tenses, and aspects, although I sure Mr Cody could not articulate his object using those terms. He'd probably collapse it all under tense. The do construction is sometimes called the emphatic (mood) and the "have heard" construction the present perfect.

The interesting thing about present-day English is that we have a more complicated system of turning declarative statements into questions. No longer do we say things like "Ask not what your country can do for you but ..." which sounds old-fashioned and or poetical, but "Don't ask what your country can do for you but ...".

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(BTW, I see no reason in the ending a sentence with a preposition either, but then maybe that's just me.)

I think you know it's not just you. You taught me about Dryden. It was all a ridiculous mistake.