Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

If I'm not mistaken, "snuck" started as a southernism; I don't think I heard it growing up in Minnesota, or if I did it was as an informal joke, quickly corrected among adults. Let's see, "sneak", "sneaked", "sneaked", right? But you're right, "snuck" seems to be gaining currency. Is it because it sounds like some other verb?

What I mean is that a few of the Germanic "strong" verbs seem to be losing one of their forms. The principle parts of "drink" are "drink", "drank", "drunk", but some people seem to be forgetting "drank" and just saying "I drunk some of it". The same thing is happening to "sink"; instead of "sank" in the past tense, quite a few people think the past tense is "sunk". And not just some but most people seem to have forgotten all about "stank"; they think the play stunk, which is just wrong. In fact, they're conjugating "stink" (and sometimes "sink" and "drink") like "sting" instead of like "sing".

What I'm wondering is whether "sneak" is being conjugated some some other verb that "sneak" reminds them of. I just can't think what it might be.

Or maybe this is just what happens to such verbs. We constantly hear "think" and "thunk", "take" and "tuck", "bring" and "brung", "drove" and "druv". Maybe it's just the same thing happening to "sneak" and "snuck".

Just to nail down the obvious, the technical difference between "take" and "bring" is that "take" is in motion away from the speaker and "bring" is toward. That is, if you ask me to take you to school you're speaking from the point of view of not being at school yet; if a colleague asks me to bring you to school, she's speaking as though she is already there and I'm bring you to her. This convention is so frequently ignored that it makes little or no practical difference. But it may be that it reflects what people are imagining when they select one word or the other.

Good point, Glenn; I would have been better off to say "bring" and "take" have to do with the direction of travel from or to without specifying that it was in the point of view of the speaker. I was tempted to argue, about the flowers, that if I say I'll bring them I'm still imagining myself there, anticipating having brought them to that place. But about the time I got to "I'm coming, I'm coming" to the doorbell, I gave up; it's clear I mean I'm coming from YOUR point of view, not from mine.

And, as I said, there are enough fuzzy examples that I'm convinced even that doesn't really pin it down. I don't think there is any pinning it down; we just say what we say, in this case, without having to mean anything very exact by it.

Different languages follow different rules....

That's what I like about languages, that they're different. Every time I learn a new language—ok, every time I tackle a new language, for I hardly ever stay long enough to say I've learned it—I discover some new way of doing things that I could never have invented myself. And every time I marvel "Wow, I never thought of doing it that way!", and love it. Like when I finally understood the French "en" and "y" (sort of prepositions, sort of pronouns), or the Scandinavian definite articles (in the form of noun suffixes), or all those Swahili prefixes, or the exhaustive Greek verb forms (Latin has 'em too but I learned Greek first), or the surprisingly, beautifully flexible Esperanto pronouns. There's always something to marvel at. The Spanish have two words for "to be", and lo and behold it turns out it's because they represent two different things! Classical Greek uses prepositions for nouns ("accomplished by the sacrifice of the having-been-loved"), and it works beautifully. Russian has one-letter words that are consonants, not vowels: Who'da thunk it? In Farsi, the very same verb endings that indicate person and number can be added to nouns to make them possessive and to adjectives to mean "to be": goftam, "I said", mikhoram, "I want", but also doostam, "my friend", and khoubam, "I'm good". As Adam Savage said, I love surprises!