Or, in Western PA (maybe elsewhere, but that’s where my roommates were from), “the cat needs petted.” Actually, the context was a dirty floor, “the floor needs swept.” I would have said, “the floor needs to be swept”, and I’ve also heard “the floor needs sweeping”, but the past tense with the dropped “to be” is a Western PA thing from what I can tell.
As a New Yorker, I’m cursing the dropping of “the” before prom. As in, “are you going to prom?” When I was a youth, back in the 12th century, it was “are you going to the prom?”, but now even my just-west-of-NY kids drop the “the”.
Back to the OP, no, I’ve never seen or heard anyone drop the “ed” from “assault” or “text”. I’ll text you. I’ve already texted her.
I have noticed the “text” thing a lot, since it annoys me terribly. I’m not talking about teens here either, but people my age (mid-30s) who should know better and who didn’t grow up using “text” as a verb.
“She text me yesterday and told me x.”
I’m fine with saying “texted” there. I’m not sure if the people saying “text” are avoiding a slightly awkward pronunciation by swallowing the -ed or if they actually think that’s correct.
On your related note, I went most of my life without hearing “verse” for “versus” in the Midwest. It seems the people I’ve heard say it as an adult are from Pennsylvania or somewhere on the east coast, so in my experience it seems to be some sort of regionalism and not a random misreading of the abbreviation “vs.”
I’ve heard “bias” and “prejudice” as adjectives too, and I don’t think it’s due to /t/ elision, since they’re not eliding the /t/ in other similar sounding words.
Perhaps it started that way, but people are learning and using it incorrectly, including putting it in writing (like how people write “could of” instead of “could’ve” because they sound the same when spoken).
I’ve noticed such sentences as “according Officer Davis, the suspect was intoxicated” as opposed to “according to…”. Reporters for the local daily (Lafayette Journal & Courier) employ this construction so frequently that it appears to be the paper’s standard usage.
Yes, the apogee of peeving about the deterioration of the language was Jonathan Swift in 1712. The quality of peeving has gone consistently downhill since then. Social media is partly to blame - there’s an abundance of peeving in internet comments, but that’s quantity rather than quality. The peeving is just so sloppy and casual - completely unlike the finely crafted peeves that you would find in the letters to The Times of my parents’ generation. The quality of teaching is also partly to blame: students today learn so much more about descriptivist linguistics that they seem unable to summon up the ignorant self-righteous vitriol that’s required to carry forward the finest peeving traditions of our forebears.
My prom was in 1984 and we always used “the prom” when talking about it. More importantly, Stephen King - the all time expert on proms- calls it “the prom”.
I think “to prom” vs. “to the prom” was a regional thing. In NY, we said “the prom”, but my wife from the Midwest has always dropped the “the”. My kids and their friends from the Garden State also drop the “the”.
Regarding vs., my youngest and his friends, back when they were playing U10 and younger soccer, used to ask “who are we versing?”, but that seems to go away when they get older.
This is sort of a weird one. I’l ignore the missing “to be”, which is a totally different pattern that appears in some dialects.
Consider:
“The cat hates to be wet”
“The cat hates to be wetted”
Both are acceptable sentences, though the second seems awkward. Although cats hate to be wetted, and the action of wetting is to make something wet, somehow the sentence works better when we talk about the adjective rather than the verb. Even if we wanted to focus on the action, we’d probably say “The cat hates getting wet” instead.
“Pet” can be an adjective, though the usual definitions don’t include “the condition of being petted”. And yet… why not? It’s a pretty small leap, all things considered. It’s kind of poetic, actually–a “pet cat” can be both a cat kept as a pet; and a blissful, satisfied feline recipient of a petting.
The mention of “dio-seez,” though not quite the same phenomenon, reminds me of something a former boss used to say. Evidently unaware of the singular word “parenthesis,” he started with the more common plural “parentheses,” and back-formed the singular by simply dropping the “s”: “pa-REN-the-see.” That gave me a nails-on-the-chalkboard feeling.
