The Vine: January 16, 2013
I have a small child who loves the Berenstain Bears and we read them over and over. The phrase below seems incorrect, but I'm not a grammar expert so I'd like to get a definitive answer. Here's the complete text:
Brother and Sister picked up their safety gear and sneaked out of the woods while Too-Tall and the gang were bouncing off the trees.
I think that "sneaked" is incorrect, would "snuck" be a better way to phrase this?
Flummoxed in Bear Country
According to Garner, "snuck is a nonstandard past tense and past participle of sneak common in American dialectical and informal speech and writing. The standard past form is sneaked." Writer's Digest confirmed that "sneaked" is the standard in an article last June, adding that, while "snuck" is not preferred, it's "also acceptable."
My first instinct was to agree with you. I assumed that "sneak" is one of those semi-irregular verbs whose past tense gets tricky (i.e., "sink") or varies depending on what's meant (i.e., "hung a picture," "hanged a murderer"). A forensic history of the past tense of "sneak" would likely reveal that we've overcorrected on it, assuming that it's like "stick / stuck," when the verb's engineering is actually quite ordinary.
In any case, "snuck" is not the preferred way to phrase it, but if it's a better way to phrase it for you, it's not incorrect, so go for it.
(Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but the edition of Garner I'm looking at has a discrete entry on the sola topi, "a pith helmet, originating in India, made from the sola plant." Evidently, it's frequently mis-rendered as "solar topi." Not having much occasion to write about Dr. Livingston types, I'd never heard the term or its incorrect stepsibling, and I don't recall if the entry survived to subsequent editions; it just caught my eye as I leafed towards "snuck." My schoolmates used to wonder, not particularly kindly, how I could "end up" reading the dictionary after going to look up a single word. This is how. As you were.)
Tags: Bryan Garner grammar our friend English