#team slode

It’s no secret that English grammar is really weird. The only insight I will add to that, with a Ph.D. in linguistics nearly in hand, is that the grammar of all languages is also really weird.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the following interaction among Redditors:

The issue is apparent immediately. The original poster, in green, says that a group of people “fell/slided a few meters.” Slided, of course, is not prescriptively correct, but does appear (infrequently) in English, even in edited work. 

The top reply in orange just repeats the error, simply saying slided again, almost in veneration or amazement. A correction is provided, by purple. This is no surprise; Redditors pride themselves on the standardness of their spelling, punctuation, and grammar sometimes to the point of zealotry. As the purple user notes, slid is the preferred standard English past tense form of slide. So you get hide:hidden:hid and slide:slidden:slid. Yeah, seriously: slidden is mostly obsolete now, but in older sources and hypercorrect works, it pops up: 

Then, a whole chain of jokes arises naturally from the shared intuition that something about slide:slid is just...weird. Slode, one person in red offers up. Slad, replies light blue.

We know, as native speakers of the language, that those aren’t right. They just can’t be. We might not know what’s right...but whatever right is, it ain’t that. 

And yet, there’s a kernel of truth to them: slad really is an old past tense of slide (though pronounced like sod and not like had). Slode, of course, is built on the analogy of words like ride:ridden:rode. As a word, it's simply dreadful; it reminds me of a race of sluglike beastfolk - and that’s overlooking the Urban Dictionary entries for slode or sload, mostly just disgusting portmanteaux. 

...And guess what? 

Slode is real. 

Take in this delightful entry from John McLellan's (1978) “More Figures of Speech,” especially the sample sentence in the second paragraph:

So there you go. Some people think that the English language has gotten worse over time, or that it’s bad now and it used to be good. But I think we can all agree that no matter how far our language has slidden since the 1400s, it’s probably for the best that it never slode down that path.