"The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was or where it led to." --E.B. White

Little known fact: many irregular verbs started out as regular ones, and over time changed to irregular. One example is "drive." It used to be drive/drived/drived. Then, in what was to become Canada and the U.S., people started saying drive/drove/driven. English who visited the colonies were so distressed at this that they raised alarms about the deterioration of the language. One included, "What's next? 'dive/dove/diven'?" At the time, "dive" was also a fully regular "~ed" verb, and in time, it too changed to "dive/dove", but not "diven". Is our language now in a fallen state?

In a population, young people, typically, are the language innovators. Almost all permanent change to language comes originally from teenagers. So now some young people are saying "text/text/text". Looking at other verbs which follow the pattern --cut/cut/cut, cost/cost/cost, put/put/put, hit/hit/hit-- it seems there's a pattern: they all end in "t". Seems like the language is continuing to evolve in the same way it always has. Whether this language innovation will stick has yet to be seen.

But language will change from the way you learned to speak it. There is no doubt about that. You can accept it, or you can get stressed, but it's happening.

>> ^Deano:

I can only say that in England we definitely don't use "snuck". And it certainly sounds odd to my ear.


No! Sneaked makes my brain want to explode, in the same way as if someone said the plane flied all the way to France. English is full of irregular verbs, and this is certainly one in common usage in the midlands, or at least amongst my friends and family.