Thursday, February 05, 2009

Approvaled

Another instance of a past tense that makes you go "huh?"

ABC has officially greenlit a pilot for its reworking of "V," the 1980s miniseries about alien lizards coming down to Earth.

(I got this from a Twitter post, but it seems to be a cite from elsewhere.)

I think my instinct would be to use greeenlighted. Probably (again) because we (well, I) like "regular" patterns for verbs and nouns, e.g., whacking -ed onto a verb for a past tense.

I briefly wondered about to light as a transitive verb; historically, I believe, this would have made it regular. But lit sounds right(er): He lit the way with a flashlight. Even so, greenlit sounds odd to me.

Obligatory Google search results:

greenlit: 256,000
greenlighted: 116,000