Basic Books, 1999. Words are memorized and often refer to everyday things. Rules help us to generate varied and original utterances.
Irregular verbs are unpredictable in form because they are memorized as individual words.
On the other hand, regular past-tense forms of verbs are predictable in form and sound, and they are generated freely because they are produced by rules. The Secret History of the American Meritocracy . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. In 1933, Harvard's new president, chemist James Bryant Conant, informed two assistant deans of his plan to create a genuinely academic undergraduate environment at Harvard. Conant's first step was to establish scholarships based on academic merit as opposed to financial need.