“The skunk in the back yard last night stunk, didn’t it?”
“No, it stank.”
Or is stunk right?
What about this one: “The ship sunk during the storm last night”? Is that correct?
English. It can be beautiful, powerful, inspiring. It can also be maddeningly confusing and inconsistent.
There are so many inconsistencies to trip people up, that if languages were shopping malls, English would be closed until it was brought up to code.
For instance, consider the past tense. English usually indicates an action that occurred in the past by adding an –ed to the end — like in occurred. Then there are all the other verbs that show past tense in other ways, like thrown, or eaten.
Verbs that end in –ing and –ink give people a lot of trouble. Simple examples pretend to set the pattern:
| Infinitive | Past tense | Past participle |
| ring | rang | has rung/was rung |
| sing | sang | has sung/was sung |
Then, English goes and changes the pattern just a little, with –ing verbs that have identical past past participle forms. There doesn’t seem to be any logical distinction. You just have to memorize this.
| cling | clung | has clung |
| fling | flung | has flung/was flung |
| hang | hung “from the chimney with care” |
has hung/was hung |
However, when using hang to mean a form of execution, the past tense and past participle arehanged and was hanged: Billy Bailey was the last person to be hanged in the US.
Some verbs ending in –ink conform to these patterns, too:
| drink | drank | has drunk/was drunk |
| sink | sank | has sunk/was sunk |
| slink | slunk | has slunk |
| stink | stank or stunk | has stunk |
But not link or ink (as in to put something in ink, or to cover something with ink).
Of course, there are –ing verbs that follow the more usual pattern of adding –ed for the past tense and participle: ding or ping, for instance.
Then, there are the most baffling verbs of all:
| bring | brought | has brought/was brought |
| think | thought | has thought/was thought |
There is almost a logic, but if you can’t have more than two examples that follow the same method to indicate past tense, that doesn’t really make it a system.
To answer the questions I started with: stunk or stank are both acceptable past tense forms forstink, according to the Oxford Dictionary. However, sank is the correct past tense for sink, whilesunk is the past participle.
What about you? What exceptions give you the most trouble?
The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic.
The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg.
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I’m afraid my head is spinning! When I run, ran into confusing past tense verbs, I avoid them by rewriting. Can’t allow those crazy rules to begin haunting me when I began to figure out a word that has begun to make sense. Oh well, hang, hung, or be hanged by the rules. Thanks for making me sweat or should I be sweet and sign off. 🙂
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My biggest issue are throw away words that people use in real life dialogue…that and just. Almost everywhere the two appear in a manuscript they can be deleted.
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Oh. My. WORD! This makes me want to quit writing!! The English language is SO confusing. My mom used to teach English when we lived overseas and she said it is the hardest to learn because of all the exceptions. Thanks for clearing things up Scott 😉