If you read scientific articles every now and again, you probably know what it is like to stumble upon an exceptionally well written one. Well, rare as it is it does happen. When reading Nature articles that are outside of my scope, I rarely read beyond the abstract. If I do, I rapidly get lost in the myriads of details and the use of strange, detached scientific sounding English. A recent article in Nature entitled Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of Language by Liebermann et al (Nature 449, 713–716; 2007) marks the exception. The theme of the paper is simple but intriguing: the decay of irregular verbs in the English language and how verb regularization is dependent on the frequency of use. In the study, the authors have created a data set containing verbs with evolving conjugations. In this dataset, they tracked changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs, of which 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. The authors elucidate the dependency of of the rate of regularization on the frequency of word usage. To sum it up: The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. That is, in itself, kind of neat. But the article is particularly well written. I suggest you read it yourself (it is quite short) but I will not leave you without a taste of the good stuff. “New verbs entering English universally obey the regular conjugation (google/googled/googled), and many irregular verbs eventually regularize. It is much rarer for regular verbs to become irregular: for every ‘sneak’ that ‘snuck’ in, there are many more ‘flews’ that ‘flied’ out (…) Like a Cheshire cat, dying rules vanish one instance at a time, leaving behind a unimodal frown.” Careful… spoiler ahead. Want to know which irregular verb is the next to regularize? “It is likely to be wed/wed/wed. The frequency of ‘wed’ is only 4.2 uses per million verbs, ranking at the very bottom of the modern irregular verbs. Indeed, it is already being replaced in many contexts by wed/wedded/wedded. Now is your last chance to be a ‘newly wed’. The married couples of the future can only hope for ‘wedded’ bliss.”