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“I’ve been surprised that not a ton of guys have really learned it outside of the baseball talk and basic conversation,” said Dozier, now a 32-year-old second baseman for the Washington Nationals, who is nearly fluent in Spanish even if he still struggles with irregular verb tenses.

For example, languages lose irregular verb conjugations or other word forms that are hard to remember.

But other people’s mental grammars see “greenlight” as a form of the verb “to light”, an existing irregular verb with the past tense “lit”; hence “greenlit”.

Most incredibly, and movingly, the whole crowd, including English fans who had never handled a French irregular verb in their lives, roared out the Marseillaise at full throttle.

“He was Velasco, Valasky, Valasca, Valesques,” Ms. Cumming writes, “like the conjugations of an irregular verb.”