Friday, January 01, 2010

Pleaing the Recency Illusion

Ridger hed Headline in today's local paper:
Mother to plea in death case
That struck me as very odd. Surely it should have been "plead".

I still think so; verbing "plea" isn't necessary, it doesn't add any nuance that "plead" doesn't have. But it's not recent. My cursory search this morning turned up 373 hits, including a law book from 1915 and another from 1906. So it's been around a century, and probably longer. The Recency Illusion lives!

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3 Comments:

At 4:16 AM, January 02, 2010 Blogger An Anonymous Coward had this to say...

For whatever it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of "plea" as a verb all the way back to c. 1440, though it lists it as "Sc. and north. dial.".

 
At 3:19 PM, January 25, 2010 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

So if plea is a verb, is pleaing the correct present participle of that verb? I ask because I swear this attorney is actually using that term in this transcript.

 
At 5:10 PM, January 26, 2010 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Yes; "plea" is a perfectly good verb and much older than I had thought - though much rarer than "plead", to which it is obviously related. It may have be formed by people parsing "plead" as a past tense, but it's fine now.

And being fine, "pleaing" would indeed be its participle. Every single verb in English has a regular pariciple in -ING, even the king, nay Emperor, of irregulars, "be"...

 

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