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Martin Allen has written with a very interesting question. It follows on from his initial query, which is why people use text as the form of the verb in the past tense: ‘I text him yesterday.’ He adds: ‘It sound moronic to me, but is this how irregular verbs originate?’

The funny thing is that Shakespeare himself might have used the regular texted as a past tense. He probably did, for he used the verb text in the imperative in Much Ado: ‘Text underneath: Here dwells Benedick the married man.’ The meaning, naturally, was not ‘send a text electronically’, but ‘write in a text-hand or in large letters’. Thomas Heywood (a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and much under his influence) mentioned passersby reading words ‘as perfectly and distinctly, as if they had beene texted in Capitall Letters’.