Word: irregulars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...headed to boot camp in a week now, if the Army keeps its latest word, and we have been getting fat. Such things make a man beg for push-ups. Such things make a formerly lazy man like me sneak off for evening runs - highly irregular stuff and yet so bitterly satisfying...
...against the Big Green (14-6, 5-2), physical play and the irregular grass surface, on which the Crimson had not played since a 2-0 win Sept. 25 at Yale, knocked Harvard off its game, resulting in the team's most lopsided loss of the season...
...Irregular and regular verbs embody the two underlying tricks behind the gift of articulate speech: words and rules. A word is a memorized link between a sound and a meaning. The word duck does not look, walk or quack like a duck. But we can use it to convey the idea of a duck because we all once learned to connect the sound with the idea...
Regular and irregular verbs today have their roots in old border disputes between words and rules. Many irregulars can be traced back over 5,500 years to a mysterious tribe that came to dominate Europe, western Asia and northern India. Its language, Indo-European, is the ancestor of Hindi, Persian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Gaelic and English. It had rules that replaced vowels: the past of senkw- (sink) was sonkw...
...irregulars are vulnerable too because they depend on fallible memory. If a verb declines in popularity, speakers may not hear its irregular form often enough to fix it securely in memory. They fall back on -ed, changing the language for following generations. That is why forms from Chaucer's time such as chide-chid and writhe-wrothe turned into chided and writhed...