I've recently watched West Side Story and heard some weird expressions, one of which is "I was had":
Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
They won't give me a puff.
They didn't wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!
The movie is set in the early sixties, so this may not be used anymore. It is also part of a song, so it may even be a license and never really used.
Does this sound right in today's standard English? Can "have" be used in passive constructions at all?
Best Answer
Oh, wow, that's a much more complex bit of word-play than it seemed in the title of the question.
The expression "was had" is an idiom that means "was cheated or tricked", and is perfectly valid English. However, that is not the meaning of "was had" in context – though it very clearly is an allusion to and playing with the "was cheated" sense. The people singing are criminals, and they're singing about their being criminals – people who cheat and trick others; their song is a list of humorous excuses for their behavior, and "I was had!" can be a kind of excuse.
The context was:
In another idiomatic use of "to have", such as "have me", here, means "to give birth to a child". The singer is saying "My parents didn't want a (or another) child, but somehow they wound up with me."
Using "was had" to mean "was born" this way is very unusual, but makes literal grammatical sense – and reminds the listener of the idiom "I was had" meaning "I was cheated".
The entire song is a list of the reasons the characters addressed should have mercy on the young criminals, and those reasons are all specious explanations that position the criminals as the real victims of the unfairness of life: everything bad they do is someone else's fault.