Losing Your 'Ed

A Potted Summary

There are many phrases in English, in its myriad incarnations, of the form [verb]-ed [noun], for example "clotted cream". The meaning of the phrase in this construct is clear, they are [noun]s that have been [verb]-ed, and all is good. Other phrases have a similar form [property]-ed [noun], meaning [noun]s that have the property property, such as "horned viper".

The interesting thing about such phrases is how many of them vary across different dialects of English, and that they also seem to change over time. The curious thing is that one particular variation seems to be dominant. Some have changed into what might be considered [[eggcorns]], but others seem to have undergone this change so far back that they are now considered the standard form, and the -ed form would be considered deviant. This document is intended to investigate these forms, both ones that exist and don't exist, to find past changes and possibly predict future ones.

Note, I am not a linguist, or a philologist, I have merely had an amateur interest in the field for many decades, and have yet to see anyone delve deeply into what appears to be a language change that is happening right under our feet, albeit glacially.

The Thesis

In short, it seems that there has been a trend towards the dropping of -ed over time, or even skipping that stage entirely.

[verb]-ed [noun] → [verb] noun

The interesting thing about this change is that it seems to behave like an [[eggcorn]]. A simple meaningful two-word combination mutates into a form that sounds similar, but pedantically looking at it with the corrupted word in place, seems to make no sense, or even be gramatically unsound. You can't make lightning out of grease, so grease lightning is superficially completely meaningless, whereas greased lightning clearly refers to the application of a lubricant to something that's already known for its speed to imply something of extreme rapidity.

A Brief History Of -ed

The words ending -ed found in such constructs may have any number of curious properties that could help explain some of the fluidity of the form, both as written and as spoken.

• Is it recognisably, or solely, a participle - when the -ed is removed, what are you left with? Some -ed words aren't recognisably a past tense of a verb. The adjectival [property]-ed/[noun]-ed forms implying "having [property]/[noun(s)]" are distinct from the adjectival [verb]-ed form which implies "having undergone [verb](-ing)". The arrival of new words in the language with many uses (is "fish" a noun or a verb? Answer: yes.) sometimes smudges the distinctions, but some are clearly not participles.
• Was it pronounced as an extra syllable or not? This lives on mostly in verbs whose stems end 't' or 'd': "needed", "floated", etc., but there are many other examples, such as "horned viper", "blessed relief", "dogged determination", or "our learned professor". Some may be considered affectations, or old-fashioned. Which raises the issue of that additional syllable property being one that can change over time, which might also influence how the word behaves in the noun phrases I'm considering. From earlier forms of English, including middle-English, you can see from verse that the syllable was there to match the scansion, even when the [[onset]] wasn't 't' or 'd'. [[The Blacksmiths]] has many, even if their particular rendering was -yd as often as -ed.
• Some past tenses weren't -ed, but were -t instead, and some still are. "Slept", "kept", "crept", and "dreamt" still remain in use. However, as the distinction between the pretirite form and the perfect form (the past participle) has begun to lose importance, and they have almost become interchangable in modern colloquial US English. This, and other regularisation has enabled the -ed forms to crowd -t forms out of the language. There are dialect variations, including some split across the pond such as US "leaned" vs. UK "lent", US "loaned" vs. UK "lent", or the almost universal "spelled" vs. the highly unmodish "spelt". One thing's sure - you'll never take my "yclept"!
• Some are pronounced as if they are -t even if they're -ed. Language, like all things, under a lack of pressure to formalise it, will tend to suffer from entropic decay, and become lazier over time. And for a lot of words, a final tap of a 't' is lazier than voicing a 'd'. In contexts other than stops, the opposite might occur, such as "fidy" for "fifty", but for final stops the 't' sound just seems more natural in most contexts.
• Being phonetic, the start of the next word may influence the modification of the end of the prior word, so these cases must be considered in the fuller context of the word pair.
• ... still writing ...

Examples

This list isn't trying to be comprehensive, but it trying to capture all of the possibilities that i can think of. The rubric is as follows:

• 'full' and 'stub' are simply the two competing forms this row is about, where the -ed form is the 'full' form, and the one missing it is the 'stub'
• 'stub can be' refers to whether the stub formed from dropping the -ed seems to be a verb, a noun, an adjective, or nothing.
• 'voiced' and 'next sound' are the sound the -ed makes, and the sound the second word starts with.
• 'UK usage' and 'US usage' are complete guesses about prevalence, on a range from 'always' to 'never'
• 'transition' is an estimate of when dropping the -ed took place.

... way way way way way more stuff, which I will pull out of the dump below and expand on with classification...

Further Discussions

Apparently, I'm not alone, others have looked at the same topic:

• Has there ever been "crossed purposes"?
• Michegan Radio: That's What They Say - iced cream, skimmed milk, creamed corn, creamed cheese, whipped cream
• Freeman (SN ID 732) on Monday March 29, @05:27PM (#1130843)
  You used to actually cook ice cream when making ice cream. Look up some old recipes. A Dairy Queen ice cream cone was once known as "Iced Milk". https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/08/how-to-make-ice-milk.html [seriouseats.com]
• English StackExchange - iced cream, skimmed milk, popcorn, wax paper and whip cream
• Language Log - all the above, plus fried chicken, pulled pork, mulled wine, hard-boiled eggs, rolled oats, cracked pepper, combed cotton, wrought iron, dropped ceiling, shave(d) ice, bake goods, "fry shrimp", "boil crabs", "black-eye peas", "can goods", "jerk chicken", "sundried tomatoes", "corned beef", "install base"

Brain-dump

Here's the original conversation that inspired us to create this page. To protect the innocent, I have called my interlocutor "Osku".

18:14 <FatPhil> fucked if I know
18:17 <Osku>    being spoiled with the school systems of soviet finland era's practices
                - book learning in british english, practical learning in usa tv - I
                thought it'd be "fuck if I knew".
18:24 <FatPhil> the trailing -ed is very often dropped in USian, and that often
                filters back to international English, and eventually English.
18:25 <FatPhil> The classic example would be "iced cream", being iced cream, and thus
                sensibly named. However, the US took over and we ended up with "ice
                cream" instead. Which makes no sense, as it's not a cream made of ice.
Day changed to 07 Nov 2020
Day changed to 08 Nov 2020
# At this point, I ask Anna for her input
12:03 <FatPhil> similar to "iced cream" is "iced tea". One that's in transition right
                now is "Sugar(ed) Almonds". One that shows the US/UK divide is
                "Skim(med) Milk", you'll never hear "skim" in the UK.
12:04 <FatPhil> One that's done the full transition, irreversibly now the sides have
                joined, is "popcorn".
12:07 <FatPhil> My brain wants to say "waxed paper", but my tongue refuses to do the
                extra flap and produces "wax paper".
12:10 <FatPhil> I found it hard to come up with examples, as I reject most
                americanisms, so these examples come from Anna.
12:17 <FatPhil> Another situation where the Americans have realised that the removal
                of the '-(e)d' makes no sense, and so have kept it in almost
                universally is "Greased Lightning". However, one of the biggest
                lyrics sites in the world thinks this song exists:
                https://genius.com/John-travolta-grease-lightning-lyrics
12:19 <FatPhil> I think we'll create a webpage about this, this was a very
                interesting language-related question, thank you!
    

Also:

Hash browns (1926) is short for hashed browned potatoes (1886), with the -ed omitted, as in mash potatoes --       https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=hash
      * breaded
      * ground
      * damned / darned (seen as "damn'" in US lit, 60s/70s?)
      * boxed set
      * fine tooth(ed) comb
      other forms, not -ed
      * "handgrenade" has potential, but surely not "rocket-propel grenade"
      * why not "banleader"
      * you'd better
      * were humpback whales ever hump-backed whales? This 1880 book: https://chestofbooks.com/animals/Manual-Of-Zoology/Order-V-Cetacea-Part-2.html and this 1973 paper thinks so: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/balaenoptera