Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they're not so far from the pains we in the "real" world face every day. But this is a fault that can easily be forgiven in a play as delightfully outrageous as Idiots. It's not just any production that can end with a prolonged and improbable verb conjugation and still rightfully call itself entertaining...
Even children do it. Told that a man likes to wug, they will say yesterday he wugged. Children are not sponges; they're constantly creating sentences and words, never more clearly or charmingly than when they encounter the second flavor of verb, the quirky irregulars. The past tense of spring is sprang, but the past of cling is not clang but clung, and the past of bring is neither brang nor brung but brought. English has 180 irregulars, a ragtag list that kids simply must memorize...
...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...
...they know some people, especially parents, are put off by the particular verb on the T-shirts. "We try to be sensitive to that. When I see kids coming, I fold up the shirts and try to shut up," one shirt vendor says. "It's all in good fun," he repeats...
Ever wonder why we say that a baseball player "flied out to center" instead of "flew out to center"? Pinker explained that the meaning of the word 'fly' has changed as the word changed from a verb to the noun 'fly ball' and then back to a verb. Over that transformation, the suffix for the past tense has also changed...