Weaved vs Wove, and other interesting verbs

Did you know that “weave” in the sense of “They weaved back and forth among the slender boles of the trees” is derived from a different word than “weave” in the sense of “They wove cloth?”

Learn something new every day.

I was reading the most recent Mercy Thompson novel, and at one point Patricia Briggs wrote a “They weaved” sentence and so I looked it up because Briggs doesn’t usually make mistakes in word usage. It turned out, as I say, that these two senses of “weave” derive from different sources and so they are really two distinct verbs that happen to be spelled the same way in the present tense but are conjugated differently.

I hope I never stetted “wove” back to “weaved” incorrectly. How embarrassing that would be. I wonder if all copy editors are up on these two different verbs and how many would re-query with a little note that no, really, they are right and the author should look it up.

I’ve stetted “leaped” back to “leapt,” I’m pretty sure, to consider a different type of irregular verb. I don’t know that I’d care enough about that one to argue with a copy editor, though. On the other hand, irregular forms like “leapt” look good in high fantasy, I think. Perfectly appropriate there even if an author might write “leaped” in a contemporary novel.

It turns out that “leapt” is not archaic, though it looks that way to my eye. The Grammarist says it’s always been an alternate past tense and past-participle form of “leap,” with “leapt” becoming more common in British English a hundred years ago. I gather this is also the case for other verbs, such as “learned” vs “learnt” – whereas “blest” has been vanquished everywhere by “blessed.” Apparently this happened when the –ed mostly stopped being sounded as a distinct syllable; at that point the –ed sometimes got replaced by a –t. Interesting! I hadn’t know that.

Not all the –t forms have lost out in favor of the –ed forms in American English. Would you say “dealed” or “dealt?” My spellchecker is pretty sure the former is just incorrect. It’s definitely uncommon and weird-looking, except in the phrase “wheeled and dealed.” I think “sweeped” looks just as wrong compared to “swept,” and once again my spellchecker agrees with that assessment.

Looking further into interesting irregular verbs, I see that some of the –n verbs have this American / everywhere else kind of thing going on. Like “hewed” in America and “hewn” everywhere else. Well, I don’t care. I like “hewn” much better. I also prefer “shone” to “shined” under all circumstances – except when “shined” is used as slang to mean “murdered” in Brust’s Taltos series! Grammar Girl suggests “shined” when the verb has an object and “shone” when it doesn’t; ie, She shined the light at the bear; the moon shone brightly. Hmm. “Shone” is just a more attractive word and yet that difference does look right to me. What do you think?

Of course we all know the difference between “hanged” and “hung” – right? Grammar Girl says that, like the difference between “weaved” vs “wove,” this difference in the past tense of “hang” came about because there were really two different verbs originally, “hon” and “hangen.” Fascinating stuff!

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