, Columnist
On the Natural Selection of Words
New research suggests that languages evolve a lot like organisms do.
More dynamic than it looks.
Photographer: Hugh Pinney/Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
Which would you choose, sneaked or snuck? My first instinct when faced with this question was to worry about which was correct. While sneaked sounds vaguely more grammatically correct, snuck sounds natural.
The person who posed the question to me wasn’t a grammarian but a computational biologist named Joshua Plotkin. And he wasn’t concerned with right or wrong. To him, this was a nice example of language evolution in action — and if he’s right in a recent analysis, that process is like biological evolution in ways people hadn’t previously recognized.