"Shaven"

[George Thompson]

I stand with Wilson on this matter, as I do on most other issues.

I invite him to join me in forming a society for the defense of strong
verbs.  They are threatened, and before long we will have a language with
nothing but niminy-piminy verbs.  A few nights ago, I heard a baseball
broadcaster say "he drived the ball into the left-field seats".

If we lose "drove", we will have lost everything.

But I don't want to just defend our remaining strong verbs.  We need to
create new ones, to replace those we have already lost.  I propose that the
verb "I tweet" should have for its past tense "I twat".

Thanks.

GAT

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:52 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is it dead?! I was describing to my wife a man who had a "shaven" head
> and she corrected the adjective to "shaved," automatically! WTF?! Has
> "shaven" gone the way of "proven"?!
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org