Thursday, August 11, 2011

He Shot a Man in Reno

KTXL: "Inmates typically do not choose to return to prison once they are released, but Thursday morning officers at Folsom Prison were dealing with a former prisoner who snuck back on campus."

Just an aside here: We former English teachers recommend a six-year sentence in Folsom for people who use the word snuck unless those people are Dizzy Dean.

7 comments:

Lawrence Person said...

Are you also suggesting they be hung?

Jerry House said...

Isn't the correct word "snucked"?

Unknown said...

There ya go.

Mel Odom said...

I have college kids who believe snuck is a work. I allow it in dialogue, since we use it that way, but NEVER in narrative. A pet peeve.

And don't get me started on using the word SMIRK.

Cap'n Bob said...

You can't ban smirk, Mel. I always refer to the couch-jumping fool as Tom "Smirking Dwarf" Cruise. (Snuck that one in, heh-heh.)

SB said...



SNUCK (Past and Past Participle of "Sneak") -- this was mentioned in a video in an interview from LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O'BRIEN so the word is real, but probably it is misused.

-SB

"So I sneaked into ... " -- "So I snuck in ... "

SB said...


Take that actually as:
it is a "real" word. MERRIAM-WEBSTER reads:
" 'Sneak had the past tense form sneaked when it first appeared in the late 1500s, but about 300 years later, in the late 1800s, the form snuck started showing up in the United States. To appreciate how odd this is we should recap the two basic English verb categories. Those that take the familiar -ed for their past tense and past-participle forms

...Perhaps the most mysterious part of the story of snuck is the question of where it came from. No common verb follows the precise pattern of snuck: the past tense of leak is not luck, of streak is not struck, of creak is not cruck, of peek is not puck. It's as if snuck just sidled on in and made itself at home in the language, and most of us took it for a native. Pretty sneaky. '"