Spit spit spat9/9/2023 ∎ (of a cat) make a hissing noise as a sign of anger or hostility. ∎ (of a fire or something being cooked) emit small bursts of sparks or hot fat with a series of short, explosive noises. ∎ be extremely angry or frustrated: he was spitting with sudden fury. ∎ utter in a hostile or aggressive way: she spat abuse at the jury| “Go to hell!” she spat. ∎ forcibly eject (food or liquid) from one's mouth: he spits out his piece of coconut | fig. spitor spat / spat/ ) eject saliva forcibly from one's mouth, sometimes as a gesture of contempt or anger: Todd spit in Hugh's face. Spat is a perfectly normal past use for the verb "to spit".V. I told him both were right when he corrected my spit with spat. Thank you for helping me win an argument with my hubbs. Spit, spat, spat is the strong version that the weak spit, spit, spit converted to. Verbs with the stem ending in -t often lost the -d- past marker to assimilation. Spit-spat-spat is not a weak conjugation and spit-spit-spit isn't either. How is this a case of a weak-to-strong conversion? This is twig in what sense? Verbix has tweogan, meaning 'to doubt', but it's weak. I prefer spit just because "spat" sounds funny to me. Twug it is, and no, I don't use it either, but I've heard about it from an English friend who's a linguist.Īt I've never heard a past tense other than 'twigged' and I would always say 'dived', too. put, let, quit, shed), and they've been increasing in number. "Spit" is perfectly suited to become one of the English verbs that don't inflect for tense - they're almost all single-syllables ending in T (e.g. We in the UK will use 'spat' pretty well always for uses in the past tenses. This seems to be yet another example of the difference in usage between the USA and the rest of the English-speaking world. And don't forget "snuck," which is spreading fast.īut "twig"? We barely know "twigged" in these parts, and I haven't heard "twag" at all - or is it "twug"? Right, John - I grew up in a "dove" region and rarely heard "dived" before adulthood. Maybe the Times will be moved to reconsider its style choice.Īdd one more to the short list of wrong-way conversions from weak inflection to strong inflection: the best known are dive, shine, ring, wear, twig. But it's nice to see spat holding its ground in New York. He prefers spat for past tense and participle, as I do, though I don't share his impression that spit is "dialectal." (I learned spat in my Ohio youth, but I've heard past-tense spit all over.) And the OED has examples of past-tense forms like spytted and spytte long before spat, which has been circulating for a mere 500 years.Īfter so long a standoff, I suppose there's no hope for a quick resolution of the spit-spat conflict. In fact, Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage, lists spit-spat-spat, spit-spat-spit, and spit-spit-spit as possible conjugations of the verb. But editing it would have been a sensible decision, since both versions are OK. I don't know whether the online hed was changed in order to eliminate the style disparity the writer's own use of the dispreferred past tense - "More than 80 drivers reported being spat upon" - remains in the text of the Web version. But in this case, that creates an inconsistency: The story is about an assault that officials refer to as "a spat upon," and editors can hardly change that to conform to NYT style. My paper had "Spit Upon, Some Bus Drivers Go on Paid Leave for Months." That use of spit reflects Times style - the verb is supposed to be spit in present, past, and past participial uses, spit-spit-spit. Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has a nice analysis of the nouning of "spat upon," as reported in today's New York Times story, "When Passengers Spit, Bus Drivers Take Months Off." When a city bus driver is spat on (or at) by a passenger, apparently the incident is now routinely called "a spat upon."īut the headline on page one of the print edition was not the same as the one Mark saw on the Web.
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