Squoze

In 1985, Ronald Regan was speaking publicly about a small growth that had appeared on his nose. At first he thought it was a pimple, but it was actually skin cancer. Before he figured that out, however, he took matters into his own hands.

“I picked at it and squoze it and so forth and messed myself up a little,” he reported.

Aside from the question of why a public figure would say something so gross to reporters, this statement raises the obvious question: Squoze? Really? Is that, like, a word?

Not according to grammar-nazi columnist James Kilpatrick, who wrote that he had never heard such a thing. And not according to Webster’s New World dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, both of which note that the past participle of “squeeze” is “squeezed” and only “squeezed.”

And with that, we enter the realm of “dialectical past tenses.”

Words like “thunk,” “brung,” and “squoze” can be heard in certain little subgroups around the country. For example, “squoze” is most common in regions that grow oranges, according to Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Past forms like this are not “standard,” which means that they’re not widely used, so dictionaries don’t include them.

Remember, that's how dictionaries work: All they do – for every word, spelling, pronunciation, definition, and inflected form – is report how we, the English-speaking people, use the language. They don’t tell us what’s right or wrong. They listen to us, then report back what they heard in tomes called dictionaries. We take these rulings as right and wrong. That’s our choice and it’s a good one. After all, there’s no better referee of the language in existence. Still, “squoze” is only wrong if we decide to put that label on terms excluded by dictionaries.

I actually do. In my work as a copy editor, I need a referee. I need someone to just “make the call” on a million little matters. I accept dictionaries' decisions as matters of right and wrong. But linguists aren't fond of labels like “wrong.” They prefer labels like “dialectical” and “nonstandard.”

So while I can assure you that the word “squoze” won’t show up in any article I’m editing (outside of a quotation of course), you can think what you will about Reagan’s having squoze a growth on his nose.

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