Utah's bathroom snitch line hasn't found one legitimate complaint out of 12,000

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 793 points –
Utah's bathroom snitch line hasn't found one legitimate complaint out of 12,000
advocate.com
126

You are viewing a single comment

Music to my ear and I wonder how much it costed them to comb through all of that.

Fun fact, costed is a word but has a slightly different meaning than the way you have used it.

Costed means to get the details on the cost of something complex. Like "I costed the three projects and the last one is cheapest"

You tried to use it as the past tense of cost, but the past tense of cost is also just cost.

Fun fact, 'cost' is a regular verb in Canadian English. Infering from the lemmy.ca instance, the comment op might be a Canadian, which means the usage of 'costed' is correct.

Source: https://grammarist.com/usage/costed/

I am Canadian, and I was taught Cost as past tense in school and university. I've never seen it written Costed for past tense in any government publication either.

I like OPs version better and chose to evolve the language that way.

If only a very small handful of people make the same mistake, it doesn't evolve the language, it's just a mistake, plain and simple.

I know you're just trying to make yourself feel a wee bit morally superior by saying that, but it's the complete opposite of how language evolution works

It's not a mistake if I can understand the message.

It's still a mistake, no matter whether yo cn undrstnd th sntnce

People have varying degrees of ability to understand outside of what they know, what is "good enough" for you might be incomprehensible to someone else.

Yeah; as a native and fairly well-educated speaker, I'm fucked if I can form the past participles of some of our verbs

If I swim across a river, is it now the swimmed river? Swum river? Swam river?

If I sneak into a room, have I sneaked? Snuck? Both sound wrong.

Didn't find anything ambiguous about 'costed', it works for me.

If you swim across a river, it is now a river you've swum. If you sneak into a room, you have snuck in.

Those are correct but they look and sound wrong.

so if I understand correctly, the past participle of drag is... cabaret?

Would some variant of "snauk(t)" or "snaught" work for you? Your brain might be expecting ablaut in the style of "teach" / "taught" or "catch" / "caught" rather than that of "sing" / "sung".

How do you feel about "(p)reached"? "Snaked"?

A fun fact about "caught" is that it's a relative neologism. It uh, caught on after people decided they didn't like "catched" for whatever reason. (I guess it has something to do with tangibility / concreteness. Most other -atch words are used for objects.)

I prefer cost, not sure why but it just feels more natural and easier for me to say. But I am not a native speaker if it means anything.