Eat

Eat \eet\ , verb;
1. To take into the mouth and swallow for nourishment; chew and swallow

Today is day 3 of the flat diaper challenge. We're still going strong, though we always hand wash and air dry our flats, so this challenge is pretty easy.

One of babies' favorite things to do is eat. Okay, one of everybody's favorite things to do is eat. And diapers would not be terribly useful if there was no eating involved to create the waste they're catching.

My little guy eating. There's a flat diaper under that adorable owl cover. The fuzz ball is my dog.

Eat comes from Old English etan from Proto-Germanic *etanan, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *ed- ("to eat"). *-Ed is also the forebear of edible. In Old English eat was a 'strong verb,' which means it was conjugated as an ablaut. Ablaut conjugation means that the root of the word changes to indicate tense, rather than an affix. Consider the difference between sing/sang/sung and walk/walked/walked. Though there are plenty of holdovers from this system in Modern English, we don't really categorize our verbs this way. Old English had seven major classes of strong verb that each followed their own pattern. It was complicated, but there was a system. In Modern English we just lump them all into one category, the name of which strikes fear into the hearts of foreign language learners everywhere: irregular verbs.