Scuba dove?

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From the annals of (two-part) back-formed verbs and irregularization, a Sheldon cartoon:

(Hat tip to Greg Poulos.)

I've posted here on two-part back-formed verbs at least twice: on the verb gay marry here, and on the verbs early/absentee/advance vote here. These are recent back-formations, but some examples are older; here are some 19th-century examples (the dates are the earliest in my sources, not necessarily the dates of actual first uses):

housekeep, from housekeeper (1842); houseclean, from housecleaning (1863); cross-refer, from cross-reference (1879); hard-boil [an egg], from hard-boiled (1895) 

I now have quite a collection of such cases, over 70 of them, arranged alphabetically by the verb in second position (from ASSOCIATE, with free-associate, to WRITE, with hand-write and typewrite). Neal Whitman has written on these back-formations several times on his Literal Minded blog; there's a Wikipedia page (which mixes this type of back-formation in with simpler verb cases, like edit from editor, and noun cases, like kudo from kudos); and there have been quite a few postings to the American Dialect Society mailing list on them. Some of the many examples discussed on ADS-L:

executive produce, buddy work, showrun, line-jump, doctor-shop, store-buy, grudge-hold, secret-spend

That gets us the verb scuba dive. (OED2 has the noun scuba (originally SCUBA) from 1952, then scuba-diving in 1977, and the verb scuba dive in 1980.) But what is its past tense?

This, it turns out, is really a question about the verb dive in general, not just in scuba dive. MWDEU has a fairly long entry for dove, which notes that historically it was a "weak verb", with past tense dived (DARE records "old-fashioned" div as well, uninflected past dive for some black speakers, and occasional occurrences of diven, doved, and duv). The variant dove developed in the 19th century, presumably by analogy with drove, and then spread, especially in the northern U.S. and some parts of Canada. After noting that the New York Times was long dead-set against dove, MWDEU concludes (p. 370):

Although dived is somewhat more common in writing in the U.S. and is usual in British English, dove is an acceptable variant. We suggest that you use whichever is more natural to you.

Entertainingly, there is a two-part back-formed verb muff dive 'perform oral sex on a female, give head to a female', already in my list of back-formations (under DIVE), and, yes, it can have a past tense muff dove; see this exchange on Yahoo! Answers:

What is past tense for the term "cunnilingus"?

[original question] The past tense for fellate (the act of performing fellatio) is fellated. Is there a corresponding term for cunnilingus? … Okay, it's a noun. Is there a corresponding verb to the term "fellate"? That is, a one-word term, not a phrase?

[respondent] Can't think of a one word answer, but how about "muff dove" or "ate out."



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