HAHAHAHAHA!

I note your use of the expression “glid”. You are a provocative wag, OP Tipping. This deliberate idiosyncrasy rocked me back on my heels, as I’m sure it was meant to do*. I’m a creature of habit, like most of us. I wouldn’t be capable of saying “glode”, either (or of saying “rid” instead of “rode”, or “strid” instead of “strode")—or “strided” or “rided” either, for that matter.
Someone, somewhere, may be taking time off from the doctrine of the enclitic “e” to devise rules for this. Me, I’m content to carry on taking English as it comes, and simply dodging when something not to my taste (like “snuck") comes along. It wasn’t always so. Wordorigins.org, I must say, has been of great help to me, in learning to quell those prescriptive impulses which lurk deep down in all of us. I would recommend a hefty dose of it to just about anybody who speaks English, or hopes they do ;-)

*Edit: I see it hit aldi between the eyes, too. Don’t like to think of what it would have done to Dr. Johnson

I admit I thought OP was making it up about “glid,” but I see it, like virtually every other possibility, has in fact been used as a past tense of glide.  OED catalogs them: OE–ME glád (pl. glidon), ME glad, (ME glæd, ME gladd), ME glade, ME–15 Sc. glaid, ME glod, (ME gload), ME glood(e, ME–15, 18 glode, ME, 16, 18 glid, 16– glided.

Here are the citations that use it:

1827 J. Montgomery Pelican Island iii. 113 Where glid the sunbeams through the latticed boughs.
1830 C. Lamb Let. 22 Jan. (1935) III. 242 The light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye.
1847 M. Howitt Ballads 393 And the Holy Mother of Jesus Glid in with footsteps light.

Well done, lh. I thought that about OP Tipping, too. Just goes to show..... I love glood

Good heavens, what do you take me for?

For better or for worse, OP Tipping --- what else?

;-)

in East Anglia we have ‘driv’ for drove, see 0.47 here for an example (also snew for snowed)

lionello - 28 February 2013 01:08 PM

When I worked as a building laborer in the U.K. (admittedly, several decades ago) the words “fucking"and “cunting” were practically the only words used as adjectives in conversation at work. There was no direct sexual connotation at all. “Fucking” was used without particular emphasis; anything could be “fucking” - one took the fucking bus to work, one collected one’s fucking pay packet; here comes the fucking tea-can; pass the fucking shovel, Harry. When, for any reason, the emotional temperature rose a degree or two, “cunting” was added: “You dropped the fucking cunting brick on my fucking foot --- cunt!” “Cunt” was used in direct person to person address, as an aggressively contemptuous term of abuse. I recollect a joke heard from old Army colleagues: Sergeant (whispering furiously to new recruit on church parade): “Tek yer ‘at off in the ‘ouse of the Lord—cunt!”. But this was work-place language. I do not think my mates used those words in that way at home, or in the presence of women. And I never heard any of my mates refer to any woman (whether “respectable” or not) as a “cunt” --- nor do I think it would have occurred to them to do so. Moreover, using “foul language” in the presence of women would have been considered shocking bad form, even among the most unlettered of my work mates. Class distinctions (stronger then than now, I think, in Britain) also had a great deal to do with choice of language. I rarely, if ever, heard the words “fucking”, “cunting”, “cunt” used by my fellow-students at University.

I recognize, though, that if these notes are of any interest at all, it will be purely historical. Times change. Autres temps -autres moeurs, as Britain’s nearest neighbors say.

i’d say ‘cunting’ is on the decline, more usually denoting annoyance these days than any other emotion but otherwise most of what you say still holds true. Men call each other cunts all the time, often affectionately, women call other women cunts only if they’re really angry. Calling someone a cunt means the subject is stupid, or nasty. Often both. The only times i’ve commonly heard british men refer to a woman as a cunt would be with reference to Thatcher. It’s interesting how the US usage, which seems to mean something along the lines of ‘your only worth is your vagina’ is so different from what i grew up with.

I wouldn’t describe the AmEng usage of c- (as a term of abuse for a woman) as implying that the woman’s only value is as a sexual object.  While it may be true that the type of men who casually throw the c-word around are the type of men who are likely to hold that view, the application of the term doesn’t convey that view, either in general or as to the specific woman so-described, IMO.

As a term of abuse, it doesn’t really have anything to do with sex, even in a condescending or objectified way. 

I would describe it as a supercharged version of “bitch.” As with “bitch”, the c-word is sometimes used to indicate that a woman has certain, fairly specific, negative attributes (that is, that the woman is unkind, mean-spirited, pushy, selfish, insulting, unpleasant, etc.) while it is sometimes simply a contemptuous way to refer to a woman.  And in both cases the c-word is the high octane version.