I read the most interesting bit in Discover Magazine. The bit was by Stephen Ornes about how a Harvard University mathematician named Erez Lieberman created a formula that shows that verbs, slowly over time, change from irregular to regular. The article helpfully reminded me the difference between a regular and irregular verb, because lets face it, who really remembers from English class.
Regular verbs are the ones whose past tense ends in “ed”, like helped and the irregular verbs have no logic to their past tense.
The article claimed that it takes approximately 5400 years (if an unpopular verb) to 38,800 years (if popular) from an irregular verb’s past tense to change. So it’s a long time to wait for held to become holded.
And I thought…Hell, I can speed that up!
If every mother and teacher stopped correcting the natural process of this change in their children we’d have this crazy language issue cleared up in about 2 generations! Every child automatically makes all past tense verbs regular verbs. It’s the adults who then, possibly in an effort to drive our children wonky, correct their child that the proper past tense is this completely unrelated word or worse…the same word!
Did you read your book? I read it an hour ago.
It would be so nice NOT to correct the children when they make these normal grammatical mistakes. No one likes it when they get interrupted just so someone can be superior and announce they have used the incorrect word. It ruins the story flow!
Imagine how we could raise the I.Q.’s of so many ignorant people, just be abolishing irregular verbs!