Competing forms: swiffed vs swiffered (was: tased vs tasered)

[Damien Hall]

Clai's message about *tased* vs *tasered* reminded me of a Texan friend's
surprise at the form *swiffered* in 2002, when I believe that the Swiffer (a
floor-mop) was new on the market.

Raw Google hits (3 Nov 07) for all four forms are approximately:

TASED      302,000
TASERED    1,050,000
SWIFFED    425
SWIFFERED  551

For both roots, then, the unanalysed form seems to be more popular than the
analysed form.  There are, of course, the usual caveats about using Google
data, and there's another one which is new to me at least.  Google seems to
have developed some parsing and analytical capacity:

- on the first page of *tased* hits (I have only looked at the first ten in each
case) the bolded words, indicating the ones picked up by the search algorithm,
include *tasers* and *tase* as well as the *tased* I searched for;
- the first page of *tasered* results also includes hits on *taser*.

The first pages of results for *swiffered* and *swiffed* include nothing but the
terms actually input into the algorithm, though.  Could it be that for (even
fleetingly) common morphologically-complex words, someone has told Google how
to analyse them?

I'm not sure that there's a broader conclusion to be drawn from this, given the
usual caveats on Googling and the fact that I didn't (explicitly) search for
other possible derivations from these words, like *tas(er)ing*, *swiff* /
*tase* and so on.  Also, the raw numbers of hits for *swiffed* and *swiffered*
are rather low.  But it is interesting that they do at least have the same
trend as the derivations from *taser*:  maybe people prefer not to analyse new
lexical items morphologically, even when the analysis would be transparent?
Perhaps a reason for this preference would be that tracing the analysed form
*swiff* / *tase* back to its root would be more difficult than going in the
opposite direction and could lead to misunderstandings?  Of course, this flies
in the face of the current popularity and comprehensibility of *Don't tase me,
bro!*, but it will be interesting to see which form catches on in the long
term.

Just some thoughts.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

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