From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter, and on this early summer episode, essentially,
I would like to share something that I happen to have been listening to a lot.
lately, just as one listens to things.
And it's a beautiful example of this language change that I'm always preaching about,
and specifically how language change,
i.e. what gets you from Old English to Middle English to what I'm speaking right now,
always seems like chaos or junk or laziness or who to thunk it or what's going on with when you experience it within your own life.
And what I want to look at is something that's going on with verbs and the past tense and past participles.
Because what we're seeing is a real shift in the way English grammar works.
And it all makes a certain kind of sense.
This is how languages change all over the world all the time.
But here, within our lives, seeing it happen, it just seems like there's some kind of flux,
there's some kind of laziness, when really, this is what language is.
What I mean... is this.
On the surface, it can seem like, well, you know, is it dived or is it dove?
Why are people saying that the ship sunk?
Actually, something pretty systematic is happening.
It's happening in a flow chart kind of way.
It's not just one thing.