And the answer is illuminating: grammar is a mirror to ourselves. It is a living history of our desire to make sense of our words. In English, we’re currently turning sneaked into snuck. To many ears, snuck seems to “sound better,” but that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing it because it makes two nonsensical verbs—stuck and struck—seem a little less nonsensical. We did this to catched several hundred years ago, putting it into a group with taught, bought, and thought, and we’ll probably turn “dragged” into “drug” before the next century is up. We like to have groups of words that follow
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