Jul 21, 2008
Sneaked or snuck? Orison’s surreptitiousness gets me thinking about irregular verbs.
Like this post?
Verbs tend to regularize—holp became helped.
But oddly, sneak is irregularizing. What was sneaked is becoming snuck (in America, at least).
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It is incredible how changes like this have snuck/sneaked into our usage.
So are you going to tell us about what Orison was sneaking? Or is that for another post?
From askoxford.com :
Frequently Asked Questions
There is a helpful summary in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage by R.W. Burchfield (OUP 1998):
sneak (verb) Its origins are shrouded in mystery … From the beginning, and still in standard British English, the past tense and past participle forms are sneaked. Just as mysteriously, in a little more than a century, a new past tense form, snuck, has crept and then rushed out of dialectal use in America, first into the areas of use that lexicographers label jocular or uneducated, and more recently, has reached the point where it is a virtual rival of sneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world. But not in Britain, where it is unmistakably taken to be a jocular or non-standard form.
Bryan A. Garner calls snuck ‘nonstandard’ in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage (OUP 1998).
Some British dictionaries provide usage notes warning against the use of ‘snuck’.
Jamsco, it’s a new habit of his.
And on a shorter note : Two thumbs up for the use of serreptitiousness!!!
For the record, I vote for “snuck.” It doesn’t even look like a real word.
BTW, could “snuck” also be the past tense of the verb “snack,” as in, “Please don’t snack before dinner”?
“I ruined my appetite because I “snuck”? or “I ruined my appetite because I “snacked”?
Perhaps a little of both?
I am English and I think ‘snuck’ is a quite commonly used here – I’m thinking of the phrase ‘I snuck in there’ for example.
Americanisation I guess (sigh)
Will ‘snake’ work itself into this someday (sneak, snake, snuck… ?)
Adding yet another meaning for a word would be par for the course.
Isn’t there a class of words that change tense by vowel changes rather than suffixes? E.g. give/gave, know/knew, fling/flung, etc. So our usage of “sneak” vascillates between two valid ways of conjugating.
@Matt, there’s the more specific issue of which vowel changes happen, exactly. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but I remember learning at some point that they fall into certain classes.
Okay after some wikipedia-ing I’ve confirmed my hunch that there is a classification of irregular English verbs. Most of them come from the distinction between two kinds of Germanic verbs, which includes many verbs in English: weak verbs (loosely, those that add “-ed”) and strong verbs (ones that conjugate by means of a vowel change, or ablaut).
But the interesting thing is that in Wikipedia’s chart of irregular English verbs, “sneak” is described as “Weak with naturally developing strong form”, which means, as far as I can tell, that even though “sneak/snuck” looks similar to other irregular strong verbs (like “give/gave” etc.) it’s really not, at least not historically.
Sorry for geeking out, but there you have it.