Words I Hate

[Liquid]

Interim.

 

[UKMikey]

"he/she was lead astray" (past tense) is a little irritating for me. "Lead" astray? Lead ashtray, maybe.

 

[Liquid]

Read, read.
Lead, led.

Plead... pled? Some people do say and write that.

 

[W3H5]

English is chaos.

 

[UKMikey]

Because it used to be a language of conquest, they conquered a lot of foreign words from different languages plus some wordforms from the languages of their own conquerors like Italy/Rome and France and added them in.

Some people include fed and bled in the group. It's read which seems like the outlier past tense. There isn't a lot of consistency in making the past tense of lead lead if read is the only other verb which follows that pattern.

 

[GBO Possum]

 

[Pupik]

View attachment 1334964

"Diffuse" like a surprisingly weak word choice for clickbait, considering you've prevented a large and powerful wild animal from maiming people.

 

[Liquid]

Interim.

Yankee sports terminology worming its way into this side of the Atlantic.

 

[TumeK5]

Interim.

I can tell you really hate it.

 

[wheelhp]

I can at least be thankful im not french. They have it bad with female and male words for everything

 

[Pupik]

"Reared" as in: born/growing up somewhere or raised as a child of a parent.

It sounds like you're surreptitiously hidden behind someone's posterior, or just casually fell out of an immense butt.

Interim.

Yankee sports terminology worming its way into this side of the Atlantic.

I prefer "semi-permanent-but-not-yet-erstwhile".

 

[TexRex]

Read, read.
Lead, led.

Plead... pled? Some people do say and write that.

Pleaded seems to be preferred among lawyers.

The ones that rub me the wrong way are the wildly different past tense with the addition of a single letter to the root word.

Pay, paid.
Play, played.

Keel, keeled.
Kneel, knelt.

 

[Liquid]

Pleaded seems to be preferred among lawyers.

I'm sure pled is used in the UK but that might be just informally in non-legal contexts.

Pay, paid.
Play, played.

Keel, keeled.
Kneel, knelt.

I can't quite answer this fully but kneel follows the same spelling pattern as feel, deal and sleep, amongst others; the long E sound in certain English verbs undergoes an umlaut shift in the past tense. English doesn't have umlaut marks (unlike other Germanic languages) but the spelling and sounds are still changed.

Sure, many verbs with similar sounds don't follow this pattern and I would hypothesise that they are verbs that appeared later where the need to create an irregular past tense form felt (huh) weird and unnecessary. It's annoying, yes, it's irregular, sure, but it isn't quite as random as it seems. I haven't done the legwork on cognates in other related languages but irregular spelling patterns do exist in them and they're surprisingly consistent.