I just tweeted a link to The Guardian’s excellent article “To boldly go for it: why the split infinitive is no longer a mistake” (do follow me @RosemerrySong). Loved it!

But it did make me think about a grammar evolution that’s one of my pet peeves: the incorrect conjugation of irregular verbs. English is a difficult language to learn because it’s a conglomeration of many languages. Irregular verbs don’t help.

The two irregular verbs I see misconjugated most frequently are “to shine” and “to dive”. “To shine” is extra tricky because it has two past tenses: shoes were shined, whereas light shone. More and more I’m seeing sentences like, “The assassin dived behind the wall,” and, “She shined the flashlight into the tunnel.” Grates on my ears! But I realize that applying the “just add a ‘d’ after an ‘e’ to make past tense” rule to every verb ending in an ‘e’ is much easier than learning all the irregularities.

I have a feeling that ‘shined’ and ‘dived’ will become standard grammar in a decade or two. As I type, the WordPress grammar-checker doesn’t flag them as incorrect, indicating how much they’ve already been normalized. I’m not aware of any research on this topic, so if you, dear reader, know of any, please let me know in the comments.