I have always felt though, that some of our rules are for calrity and precision while others seemed intentionally complex. If a large percentage of people all use the same incorrect form, it is usually a convenience issue. I guess when enough people do it it becomes ok?

I have to admit, professional teachers, writers and speakers are held to a higher standard than the average Joe. We count on you to keep the rest of us in the know, so thank you for your tireless efforts at learning our beautifully complex language and being masters of it.

PS If I butchered our beautiful language with bad spelling and poor grammer please consider it tolerence therapy. I was one of the few lucky students that was taught ITA in the 70′s. I loved it, but being so beautifully simple, it fostered some neglect at mastering the real deal.

However, plead and prove show that weak Latinates can become semi-strong verbs as well.

@Vanessa … While I like pled, etymologically speaking, it should be pleaded. Why? Because it is yet another Latinate from French and, typically, imported verbs or verbs made from imported nouns are weak verbs. However, this was made to fit a strong verb pattern likely do to the sound such as bleed/bled. So, both past tenses are valid and correct. I like pled and will stick to it.

@Eric and David … Let me consult my medium circa materiam … Hmmmm, she’s says that treating media as a collective noun has been around since the 1920s and that it and data both can take a singular verb.

The general rule of thumb is that once a loanword is taken into a language then that language can, and usually does, treat it according to its own grammar rules and usage. It may be plural in Latin but it can be used as a collective noun in English. We do the opposite with information. In English it is a singular noun with no plural (we don’t say informations) … We took it from French … and there is a plural in French!

As a teacher of English, I love my funny old language too, with all its idiosyncracies and its variations, but as a linguist I must point out that regularization is remorseless and unexorable throughout the human speech community.

Occasionally we see a verb go the other way. Proven is common as a past participle even tho it started out as weak Latinate … proved, proved, proved can now be prove, proved, proven.

And how about get, got, gotten? I still use gotten … Do you?