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Mom and her second husband loved to play scrabble. Paul liked to lay a word along beside - instead of across - another word. They were in their 80's and got tired of interrupting the game to get the dictionary so they kept a list of valid 2-letter words in the box with the board. How fitting that Martha read Mom's librarian story on the show with Grant's discussion of 2-letter words. Lovely reading, Martha. Thanks.
Mary Clare
Both learnt and dreamt are considered grammatical by many dictionaries (but not by me, and not, apparently, by the spell-checker this forum uses). I mention dreamt only because I was at a store the other day, and the cashier attending to me was talking to another employee. The cashier loudly said something that included a word she pronounced as "dreamed", but then she immediately "corrected" herself and said, "I mean "dreamt" . . . . "Dreamed; what's that." And then she looked at me; and at the same time I admired her impulse to correct what she thought was poor grammar, I couldn't help pointing out — in detail I'm sure she couldn't have predicted — that dreamed was perfectly proper and she shouldn't feel the urge to correct herself.
Afterward, I thought about it, and I wonder. My initial intuitive justification is that dreamt is a contamination from words like sleep and creep, which take past forms slept and crept, respectively. And so dream, with its "long e" sound, seems it should take a similar ending. However, the forms dreamt, learnt, and leapt are as old as written English, at least (each of those surely appears in some Shakespeare play). So what happened? (I ask because I always taught my ESL students the standard past-tense "-ed" endings for the verbs dream, learn, and leap, exclusively, and now, thinking about it, I fell I might've been less informative than I could've been).
Ron Draney said:
what do I have to do to make it wrought iron?
Make sure that all the atoms are in a wro?
Interesting stuff happens when I look up wrought. I learned (back in the Bronze Age, before wrought iron) that wrought was the past tense and past participle of work. Macmillan says it's pt & pp of wreak, but add, "Many people consider this to be incorrect." Oxford and M-W state specifically that it is not related to wreak.
tunawrites said:
My initial intuitive justification is that dreamt is a contamination from words like sleep and creep, which take past forms slept and crept, respectively.
We have to be careful about who is the contaminaTOR, who the contaminaTEE.
Peter
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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