drig drag drug?

[Mark A Mandel]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, James A. Landau wrote:

#An irregular English verb is sometimes called a "strong verb", presumably
#because it has the strength to avoid conformity.  You might invent the term
#"strengthening a verb" but I don't recommend it.  Nor would I recommend
#"irregularize"---it just wouldn't make tense to me.

Technically, strong verbs are not the same as irregular verbs. In the
Germanic languages many verbs change the vowel in the stem to form the
past tense and/or the past participle:

        drink/drank/drunk
        sing/sang/sung

        fly/flew/flown

        ride/rode/ridden

        think/thought/thought

I think there are seven classes of these. "Drig/drag/drug" seems to be
imitating the class of "drink/drank/drunk", which iirc is historically
inaccurate because the verbs of this class all end in "ing" or "ink" in
the present tense. Not that historical accuracy is of any relevance
here!

The other funny thing about "drig/drag/drug" is that it changes the
present tense; it was a joke, yes? There are real "neo-strong" forms,
like "dove" (past of "dive") and "shat" (past/pp of "shit"), but I've
never heard of changing the stem in the present tense.

Note that none of these examples use the regular, or "weak", ending
"-(e)d" in either of the inflected forms. "Walk" is a weak verb:

        walk/walked/walked

"Have" and "go" are irregular:

        have/had/had
        go/went/gone

IIRC, the past tense "went" was suppletive, originally from the
now-obsolete verb "wend", which when used at all is conjugated weakly:

        wend/wended/wended

If I were at home I would have appropriate reference material from which
to flood you with accurate data, but I would also be undergoing physical
and mental meltdown in the brutal heat we're having in the Northeast.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large