Grammar girl here I'm in y'on foggerdie your friendly guide to the

English language we talk about writing history rules and other cool stuff today we're gonna talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about why the past tense of Go isn't Goes,

and why if you're better than good, you aren't gooder.

Then we'll talk about corporate euphemisms. They're widely hated, but their problems

aren't limited to just emotions. Have you ever wondered why one can be smart, smarter, or smartest?

But we can't be good, gooder, or goodest,

unless we're under the age of three?

Likewise, why can I go and have gone but never goed?

And don't get me started on how the verb to be shifts its form

almost as often as I change socks, appearing as is, am, are, ban, was, and were, depending on the company it's keeping.

Some might chalk this up to English simply being a little haphazard and arbitrary, in the same way that someone

from Virginia is called Virginian, while someone from Michigan is a Michigander.

But it turns out all the examples I previously mentioned is a

Michigander but it turns out all the examples I previously mentioned

are created through a rare process linguists call stem

suppletion. Now stem suppletion is where members of a semantically related grammatical set like

go-went or bad worse have separate origins and sound quite different. This is different from cases like

Sing-Sang-Sung or Ox and Oxen where they're actually just relics of a more general way English used to create different tenses or form a plural.

In those cases the roots are all still formed off the same stem.

In stem suppletion there's basically no relationship between members of the pair in terms of how

they're pronounced or in terms of their origin. A good analogy here to the example I just used would be this is sort of like the way someone is called a Hoosier instead of an Indianian.

...