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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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last night, on jay leno's tonight show, the guest Rob Lowe talked about a vacation trip, taken the previous week, and he said "We scubadived with sharks"
Jay questioned "scubadived?" and asked if there was an english teacher in the audience.
so what's the answer? dived? dove?
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I reckon 'dived' is correct. Dove is for the birds. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Gurunet went straight to Google (which means the word isn't in its dictionary), where there were 106 sites where the word scubadived was used. I reckon it must be like when we say a baseball batter flied out.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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As usual, dxb is right. As this Usage Note from AHD4 shows ( http://www.bartleby.com/61/11/D0301100.html) both forms are presently accepted but the weak form, dived is the original, at least working from the OE verb, dyfan. The other verb mentioned, dufan was strong; the first preterite would have been deafan, however *that would have transmorgrified in MnE.
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old hand
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old hand
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If you do the search with the separated or hyphenated words (scuba-dived) you even get 1860 hits. I think the unusual thing is to fuse the two.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>>so what's the answer? dived? dove?
We went scubadiving
Bingley
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Often separate words in a bound phrase pass through a hyphenated stage on the way to becoming a single word. Cf. Base ball, base-ball, baseball.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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This is, as Faldo the catowner pointed out, one of those situations where the past tense of a weak verb looks wrong but isn't. Personally, I would take the trouble to break it out into a form which didn't put me in the position of having to make a choice by adjectivising the verb - "I went scuba diving". A kind of imperfect perfect tense, if you will. Well, better than the alternative tenses anyway. "I scuba dived" or "I scuba dove" just sounds (and feels) awkward.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Can one chop liver underwater?
Bingley
Bingley
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member
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member
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so what's the answer? dived? dove?
Strictly speaking, the answer is neither.
SCUBA stands for "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus".
You can use it in shallow water, or simply by floating face-down as with a snorkle.
When using a snorkle, one does not snorkle-dive. You go snorkling.
Lowe should have said "We SCUBAed with sharks".
In the present tense, one says "Let's SCUBA", just as one would say "Let's Bomba".
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