 Let me now put on my economist's hat and ask you about this. As you know, in George Orwell's 1984, the party bans all irregular verbs. It's a kind of excess regulation. But from a social point of view, are there too many or too few irregular verbs in English? I like the irregular verbs. I'd like to see more of them. But it is sad when we lose them. Occasionally, a new one gets a toehold in the language. Like snuck, for example, is about 120 years old. It came in on the analogy of dig dug and stink stunk and sing sang sung and strike struck. So occasionally, what will protect a verb against erosion when it becomes too uncommon is similarity to other verbs. I think it's another property of human memory. One property of human memory is you hear things a lot. They stick in memory better. But another one is if it's similar to other things that are well memorized, it can parasitize the memory strength of something nearby in phonological space. And occasionally, there will be analogies. People will coin new verbs. Sometimes in a jocular way, like you're invited to a party, spice are welcome instead of spouses. It's kind of a little bit jocular. But sometimes these things can catch on. And that was the case for snuck, where originally it was considered kind of cutesy. Like spice is the plural of spouse. And in fact, people who are older than about 70 or 75 still think that it's slang. Whereas people younger don't see what the fuss is about. Are there irregular verbs you're afraid to use? Because I have this problem. So think of the word abide. I'm perfectly happy to say abide. But the past tense abode is thought of as a noun, a place. And then there's a bidden. And then there's the noun abidance. And I won't go near any of those. And every now and then you'll be in a sense where the notion of abide comes up. And you'll just stick with the present tense and do whatever circumlocution you need to avoid having to make these other irregular verb commitments. Or do you just go ahead and say stridden? Steven Pinker has stridden into the room. Yes, right. Yeah, abode has not been in common usage for a few centuries. So I mean, that's one of those that dropped out. Like chidden is the past tense of chide. For example, chidden, or hope is the past tense of help. Some of them survive in dialects, in Appalachia, in remote parts of the British Isles. Forms that were in use a couple of hundred years ago may have resisted the erosion for reasons that are completely obscure, partly capricious. But yeah, I like them. I like the one distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk, stink, stank, stunk, shrink, shrink, shrunk, where the shrank and the stank are giving way to the participle form. No shrank and stank. No shrank and stank. And admittedly, it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey I Shrank the Kids, instead of Honey I Shrunk the Kids. But in my style manual, the sense of style, I recommend hanging on to them. I think they're nice to have that three-way distinction. Because English conjugation is already so kind of depopurate, so degenerate, that it's nice to preserve what distinctions that we have.