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When I am empress of the universe, one of my first decrees shall be to make the past tense of “quit”, “quat”.

Because the lulz.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

also because verbing nouns is fun, you will often hear in our household exchanges like:

"Shall I buy a baguette?" "no, I have already baguotten today"

(or "I'm making spaghetti", "great choice, we haven't spaghotten for ages!")

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Adam

We do this to English words with the German past-tense prefix ge-. Today have I already gebreaded (German grammar optional). For bagotten it sounds more like an irregular one using be-, like benutzt.
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Sarah Brown

Can you also make ‘beard’ rhyme with ‘heard’?

I don’t care which way round; it’s enough that my kids will be annoyed that I’m actually pronouncing them right.

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Sarah Brown
@Bork! Rhymes with shat.
in reply to Chris Packham

@chrispackham
That's not actually irregular, it conforms to a clear pattern: Sit, sat. Drink, drank. Fit, fat.
in reply to Rebeca

@Rebeca @Chris Packham It is irregular. A regular verb in English has the following form:

Infinitive: (To) X
3rd person singular present indicative: Xs (or other standard plurals)
Gerund: Xing
Participle/preterit: Xed

And that’s it. There are some patterns of irregular verbs, but regular ones all have stem+ed as their past tense.

in reply to Sarah Brown

So would the pluperfect be ‘quot’?

Yikes! I haven’t used the term ‘pluperfect’ since I was fourteen.