Times, November 7, 2024
It shouldn’t surprise me that the sub responsible for the Times splash doesn’t know how to conjugate a verb, but it does.
The past tense of ‘to sink’ is ‘sank’. ‘Sunk’ is the past participle, which is used with forms of ‘have’, such as ‘I have sunk the ship’ and ‘I had sunk the ship’. It is also the passive, as in ‘the ship was sunk’. This is an increasingly common error with many verbs, and I suppose the dictionaries will eventually legitimise it.