strong verbs have resisted the pull of the regular pattern. . . . 
As a matter of fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries there was a strong tendency to eliminate the 
distinction of form between the past tense and the past 
participle in all of these verbs . . .” (p. 61)

     Print had a levelling function on all verbal and social 
forms, it had been said over and over again. And where print 
has left some inflections unchanged, as in “who-whom,” there 
yawns the great booby-trap of “correct grammar”—that is to 
say, the abyss between visual and oral modes. The status of 
these issues in the electronic age is sufficiently indicated in a 
Time  (93) report from the British House of Lords:

          In debating the merits of a bill concerning the rights 
     and liabilities of hotel proprietors, Britain’s House of Lords