1184: Significance of 'Snuck' Mar 7, 2018

Is it 'snuck' or 'sneaked'?

Linguists don't tend to like prescriptivism, so to say "it ought to be sneaked" is not seen as especially productive per se, but it does lead to some larger linguistic insights. Indeed, traditionally the word was 'sneaked', but what the existence of 'snuck' demonstrates is that there is a natural inclination (sometimes) to conjugate verbs as strong. Most of the time, these strong verbs like 'swim, swam, swum', tend to be holdovers from much older verbal systems, dating back to Old English. Indeed, most strong forms for strong nouns and verbs in English and other languages like German are on the decline, but a few newer forms are emerging, such as 'snuck' for 'sneaked' becoming even more popular, and less significantly, the rise of 'swang' rather than 'swinged', which still has some work to do.

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