Save the Endangered Irregular Past Tense
English is a funny language, a hybrid of foreign vocabulary grafted onto a Germanic original, whose grammatical peculiarities have been gradually dying away over the years. The latest words to face extinction are some of the past tenses of irregular verbs. I have seen them replaced by logical, but incorrect forms in the work of many otherwise literate writers whom I would have thought would know better.
So now I call on all who value the beauties of the English language to save the endangered verb forms–
1. The past tense for waking up is not “waked”. It is either “he woke” or “she was awakened”.
2. The past tense for “weave” is “wove”, not “weaved”. And “The cloth was woven”. “She has woven cloth.”
For “cleave”, similarly, it is not “cleaved”, but “clove”. “His head was cloven” “I have cloven many heads”.
And for “dive”, not “dived”, but “dove”. Unfortunately, however, you cannot say “he has doven.” When faced with that question, I would simply say, “he dove”, although you might get away with “he has dived”.
There are others, but these are the ones that have aroused my ire in recent reading.