Technology advances so quickly that our verbs and their related tenses struggle to keep up. Reflect for a moment upon all the new verbs we use. Twitter, “Do you twitter?” Google, “I googled you.” Webster’s, Merriam and their brethren are way behind the vernacular in not only accepting their usage, but also in helping us to determine the past, present, future, subjunctive and conditional forms of all these new verbs. In this chasm is created opportunity; we may now determine via sweeping logic and careful historical research the perfected tense forms of these new verbs.
Allow me to present an example forthwith, using the verb necessitated by the use of the proper noun “Twitter”. Twitter is, of course, originally a verb deriving from the Middle English word twiteren which is itself born of the Germanic verb Gzwitschern. As all right thinking people realize with verbs born of German stock the past tense form often changes the vowel structure of the word. Extrapolating then, if the past tense of “run” is “ran” and the past tense of “swim” is “swam” isn’t it logical to posit that the past tense of “twitter” should be “twat?”
The Musings of a Lady
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