irregular past tense in "new" verbs: highlight, te

lucy lace · Post by **lucy lace** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:18 am

What is the protocol? I cannot cannot cannot bring myself to say, "Okay class, I have HIGHLIT the answers for you"... but I am one who uses 'lit' as the past tense, and think 'lighted' looks/sounds wrong. And what about 'text,' as in, "I texted your cellphone"? Why do I hear the kids these days saying, "I text him yesterday; I haven't heard back"?
Has 'text' as a verb made the OED yet? What about Webster's? Is the past tense truly irregular?

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 3:50 am

I use "highlighted" as the past tense, and looking at the dictionary, it seems that is the correct usage. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/highlight I don't even see "highlit" as a possible choice.

jotham · Post by **jotham** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 5:44 am

It does surface occasionally according to Garner — but not enough to justify using it deliberately. You'll want highlighted, at least in this decade.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 7:56 am

I don't think there is a real threat from "highlit":

Results 1 - 100 of about 23,000 English pages for highlit
Results 1 - 100 of about 4,270,000 English pages for highlighted

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 7:42 pm

Pinker deais with a similar case which is the use of 'fly' in baseball, which has a regular past tense because it comes, I believe from a 'fly ball' and not from the verb.

Highlight comes from the trademark Hi-liter, so the verb is not seen as coming from 'light'.

jotham · Post by **jotham** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 3:36 am

But the word came first, and then the trademark, which is why it isn't protected from generic or verb use, like Google — and is thus in the dictionaries. The word was probably a noun first, which may be why it didn't conjugate like the verb light when it became a verb.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=highlight

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:40 am

Stephen Jones wrote: Highlight comes from the trademark Hi-liter, so the verb is not seen as coming from 'light'.

Where did sunlit, gaslit, and lamplit come from?

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:46 am

Where did sunlit, gaslit, and lamplit come from?

From 'light', which is why the past participle it's 'sunlit' but 'highlighted'.

Do we say 'gaslit' and 'lamplit'?

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 11:04 am

Stephen Jones wrote:
Where did sunlit, gaslit, and lamplit come from?
From 'light', which is why the past participle it's 'sunlit' but 'highlighted'.

Do we say 'gaslit' and 'lamplit'?

You may not, some still need to, others used to.

From 'light', which is why the past participle it's 'sunlit' but 'highlighted'.

The base meaning of "light/lit"is the same in both. So, there's no reason why "highlit" should not follow suit with "sunlit", etc.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:33 pm

There is a difference but I can''t put my finger on it.

Sunlit etc don't seem to come from productive verbs in the same way. Would you say "they didn't gaslight the town until 1860" or "Cutting down that tree will sunlight the garden"? Or "We must lamplight the hall"?

Whereas highlight/highlights/highlighting/highlighted seems more usable in any form.

What about:

Have you input the data?

Have you inputted the data?

As Stephen Jones has said, Pinker is interesting on this. This is similar to what he says in "words and rules":

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ ... dfall.html

and this is less digestible:

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ ... Mortal.pdf

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 3:16 pm

This is the particular quote regarding 'flied out'.

Not only is the irregular class losing members by emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new verbs enter English via onomatopoeia (to ding, to ping), borrowings from other languages (deride and succumb from Latin), and conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has first dibs on them. The language ends up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed, and flied out, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out.

Here's the quote from Juan123's second link:

The regular past tense form is not just one of several kinds of annotations to a verb’s entry; it has a special status as a default rule that applies automatically whenever it is not explicitly blocked by a competing irregular. [...] Denominal verbs (those analyzed by speakers as having been derived from, or as being built around, a noun) have regular past tense forms, even if homophonous with, or ultimately derived from, an irregular verb.

The title of the second link is "Why No Mere Mortal Has Ever Flown Out to Center Field".

'Highlight' has long predated the pen as said, and comes from painting, but the noun predates the verb, which explains the regular conjugation.

With regard to 'gaslit' and 'lamplit' both the MS Word and Firefox spell checkers mark the single word entry a mistake (suggesting 'gas lit', and 'lamp lit') and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English lists neither. Google gives the two word combination as twice as common, but there a certain proportion of the entries would be invalid, so my question, based on the spell check red mark and the Longman entry has clearly been answered.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:05 pm

Sunlit etc don't seem to come from productive verbs in the same way.

Didn't the verb "highlight" come from the noun and not the other way round?

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:22 pm

With regard to 'gaslit' and 'lamplit' both the MS Word and Firefox spell checkers mark the single word entry a mistake (suggesting 'gas lit', and 'lamp lit') and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English lists neither.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/24/G0052450.html
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?b ... &va=gaslit
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/ ... 1861674581
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/di ... try/gaslit

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:58 pm

Sorry, something seems to have got deleted while I was drafting the post on gaslit and lamplit.

They are both given entries in Merriam Webster; the SOED gives lamplight but not gaslight.

When I said my questions had been answered I meant to say that I had realized they were valid forms. I was commenting on the spell checkers and Longmans merely to explain why I had initial doubts.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:01 pm

Stephen Jones wrote:
When I said my questions had been answered I meant to say that I had realized they were valid forms. I was commenting on the spell checkers and Longmans merely to explain why I had initial doubts.