Screenshotted

I saw the word “screenshotted” today in a new story published by MSN on their browser news page in which Kellyanne Conway is reported to have posted topless photos of her 16 year old daughter on a Twitter “fleeting” page that disappears after a time, 24 hours I believe. This is possibly just another piece of evidence that the Conways may be the country’s most dysfunctional family – her husband George is anti-trump and Kellyanne lied (worked) for him. She coined the phrase “alternative facts.” The poor daughter has also been vocally and publically anti-trump. Needless to say, the family has issues. Aside from the salacious nature of the accusations and the possible explanations of how it happened, the article contained this sentence re. the photo: “ Prior to its deletion, social media users screenshotted the post, then shared it again.” Shot is the past tense of shoot, a transitive verb. It also functions as a noun. I got a flu shot. A screenshot is a noun. It is a saved picture on a computer done by a combination of the Ctrl and Alt keys. “Screenshotted” applies the rules of grammar for past tense formation by adding “-ed,” in this instance by also adding another “t” to the word. We recognize this as a verb, a regular verb. Merriam-Webster says “screenshot” first appeared in print inn 1983 and “screenshotted” in 1995. We would not say, “I am going to get flu shotted.” Nor do we say, “I shotted a deer.” It is interesting to note that the nine most commonly used verbs are irregular: say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, and take. It is interesting, too, that irregular verbs are surviving Old English words and regular verbs are borrowed from other languages. Some Old English verbs formed their participles by changes in vowels, wake/woke, and these tended to survive to this day. Others formed participles by adding -t or -ed which were then applied to verbs borrowed from other languages, inspire/inspired. An article I read says there are “about” 267 irregular verbs and two or three times more regular-ized verbs. Some regular verbs are trending to irregularize – for example, sneak/snuck. Snuck is becoming the more used alternative past participle. There are thousands of regular verbs. But back to “screenshotted” and the Conways. It is a compounded word invented to accommodate computers and technology, and although it has been around since 1995, I saw it for the first time today. I feel sorry for their daughter having to endure a mother noted for her dissembling and ability to filibuster an answer from a question by a reporter. I watched a movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie portrayed spies trying to kill each other. It was a romantic comedy.