“There’s some slate gray weaved in to the sofa.”

Contractions, Verbs

I heard this last evening during the HGTV television program “The Stagers”.

Problem:
A past-tense verb appears where the verb’s past participle is required.

Explanation:
The person who said this was referring to the colors in the fabric of a sofa.

The verb “is” — hidden within the contraction “There’s” — must be combined with a past participle of the verb “weave”.

Here are some examples of the verb “is” combined with past participles of verbs:

  • There is a piece taken from the pie.
  • There is a pink color painted on the wall.
  • The quarterback is hereby cut from the team.

The first example uses “taken” — the past participle of “taken”.

The second example uses “painted” — the past participle of “paint”.

The third example uses “cut” — the past participle of “cut”.

The past participle of “weave” is “woven”, not “weaved”, which is the past tense of “weave”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following combinations (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “is woven” — 1,230,000 matches
  • “is weaved” — 47,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “is woven” over “is weaved” by a 25.9:1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“There’s some slate gray woven in to the sofa.”