Unexpected irregular
Since I'm a Mac nerd, I basically spend all day listening to Mac podcasts. Since I'm a linguistics nerd, I occasionally find bits of interest. I'm currently listening to the March 15 edition of the Mac Roundtable Podcast (the thesis put me a bit behind) and something cool came up at about 31 minutes in. One of the podcasters was talking about one of his articles about making money podcasting:
...it got popular, I got dug, I got a lot of comments on it...It took me a minute to process the comment, but I think I finally figured out what he meant. There's a website called digg that allows people to "digg" their favorite news articles, etc. And the past tense of digg is, apparently, dugg! I would've expected regularization there, but who am I to say? Language doesn't behave just because there's a linguist listening.
6 Comments:
I would've just assumed he meant he "dug it." Huh.
Here is where I should say I'll be sure to check out this Digg thing, but it won't happen this week, for sure.
At first that's what I thought, too, but I can't passivize that very easily... short of e-mailing the guy, there's no way of telling, I guess.
(I'm not digg-savvy, either--I've been to the website a couple of times, but I can't figure out why it's supposed to be so cool.)
on digg.com, each item has a section headed "Who Dugg This?", so 'dugg' is now official usage. Open question which came first, the informal usage or the deliberate choice of words by the site owners
Aha! Thanks, Dan!
Re: regularization, it seems to me that strong verbs may be more resistant to regularization than other irregular forms. I remember the first time I heard the term "mouse" to refer to a computer mouse, I wondered whether the plural was "mice," and eventually concluded that it must be, even though it never seemed quite right. It seems like both "mice" and "mouses" - with perhaps a preference for "mice" - although when you see "mice", it is occasionally in "quotation marks," suggesting that many people share the same discomfort with the plural that I do.
WRT "digg", it never really occurred to me that the past tense would be anything but "dugg." I *think* this has to do with "dig" being a strong verb...although I'm unsure what aspect of it being a strong verb makes me feel that way. It could be something inherent in an english speakers relationship to strong verbs - which makes the phrase "Who'd a thunk it" seem, while incorrect, something that might be used in some backwater dialect of English - "he digged a hole" just doesn't seem like something a native speaker above the age of 3 would say.
Somewhat related, it could be that, because English contains more strong verbs than it contains irregular plurals, it is less strange for english speakers to expand one to a new lexical field. (I think that's true wrt plurals - I can just come up with a handful of irregular plurals - mice, oxen, deer. (Ignoring latin plurals, anyway, whcih unforntuately the NY Times does as a matter of principal).
Or it could just be that strong verbs tend to be more common verbs, so the dig/dug pattern is more ingrained that the mouse/mice pattern. Think/thank/thunk, while wrong, seems familiar enough to most people in a way that house/hice or spouse/spice does not.
Or...it could be that "digg" is related enough semantically to "dig" that it does not seem a stretch to use the same past tense. Digg is a kind of pun, both to the idea that you are digging through material to find something you like, and to the idea that you "dig" the material you find there.
Andrew: I don't share your intuition about plurals vs past tenses, but I think your last comment is probably right on (it's not enough of a semantic stretch to warrant regularization).
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