So, today we did peer editing in English.

[conuly]

And the person I was working with is a non-native speaker from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, so there were a lot of mistakes (not all non-native speakers make a lot of mistakes, but she did, so).

One of them was "quitted" for quit, and I pointed this out to her specifically, thinking to explain the rule behind it so that she could generalize instead of memorizing long lists of words. So I said that "generally, but not always, verbs that end in it or et don't take -ed in the past tense". Which is true - set, hit, fit, knit, quit, let, bet, wet, pet....

But after I said it, I realized that it's not at all true, as far as I can tell, for words of more than one syllable - omit, abet, submit... okay, most of the ones I can think of end in -mit and have to do with sending. And I guess there's reset. But the question still remains: why doesn't this rule apply for two syllable words?

Comments

[conuly]

But it does. In this case, the dictionary is simply functioning as a tool of prescriptivism and not telling us anything interesting about how language is actually used.