The use of snuck instead of sneaked as the past tense of sneak has insidiously crept into our written and spoken vocabuary over the years, and I for one am appalled. According to my American Heritage dictionary, snuck was a regional formation of sneaked and was considered nonstandard. Then, it sneaked into other regions and is now used by even the most educated people who should know better but don’t.
The good old Usage Panel frowns on the word. So do I. One of the reasons I dislike it is because the trend of English to to keep verbs regular (past tense ending in -ed), and snuck clearly is irregular, so it’s going in the wrong direction from other verbs.
I will relent this far. If you want to say snuck in conversation, go ahead, but do not, do not, do not use it in professional meetings or in writing. Impress them all to no end by saying sneaked.
Although I don’t think I have to say that if you’re confessing to an infraction or crime, it doesn’t matter which form you use. You’re toast.
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