Wordsmithing

 On or about 1980, when I was about ten, I was at the home of my friend John Parsons and we decided to play a game of Scrabble. I gained the opportunity of making the first word by virtue of my picking a higher value letter, then we drew our letters in earnest and I was just staring at mine. They looked like very compatible letters and I thought I could use most if not all of them in one word. Finally John said "Come on, quit stalling, make a word!" I said "Hold on, I think I got something.

I placed all my letters on the board making the word strived.  He said "That's not a word!" I said "Yes it is." He challenged, "What does it mean?" I said "To strive is when you try to do something." I counted up all my letters as a double word score (first word always falls on a double word) then added 50 point bonus for using all my letters. If memory serves me, I was leading 76 - 0. John quit the game on the spot as we didn't have a dictionary to settle the dispute.

Years later, I wondered (feeling a little guilty) if the past tense of strive was supposed to be strove. I never bothered to look it up and gradually I ceased thinking about it.

I later found out that, over time, through usage many speakers will be unaware that a word had an irregular past tense and they will begin using the regular past tense. Thus, slew gave way to slayed and shew to showed. My web browser just underlined slayed as an error but I can assure you L.L never warned his opponents in a rap that were gonna get slew or slain. I digress. Also, pronunciation often change over time for various reasons, the biggest of which that the pronunciation itself is problematic. The past tense of make used to be maked but who has time to navigate two frictives in a row when the word began with a voiced consonant so the word finally ended up being pronounced exclusively as made. Also, the reason we have so many weird spellings in English is that the spellings are borrowed from other countries or they came from Old English (not the 40 once malt liquor but rather the time of Chaucer). It is why, in the word eight, we don't pronounce the gh but rather the Germans sort of do with the word ocht. Of course, Noah Webster could have cleared up English spelling itself, making it more consistent and phonetic but he relied more on gleaning words from the world of academia which was in the East, an arbitrary decision which leads us to believe that American Southerners speak incorrectly rather than just differently.

Pronunciations and grammar evolve, not because some pointy-headed intellectual told us they should be but because word usage evolve for clarity and simplicity. Thus, nobody speaks of a facsimile machine today but they speak of fax because it's easier to say, Also, nobody talks about what they learned on the world-wide web or the information superhighway. Language isn't imposed from the top down but rather in the most egalitarian way possible, by the usages of the speakers themselves.