You've lived in West Texas too long when...

... You're grading papers and have to look up the proper conjugation of the English word 'drag.'

In case anyone out there is wondering, the past tense of this verb is not 'drug.' It's 'dragged.' For example, you would say, "I dragged myself out of bed," not "I drug myself out of bed." But I've lived in Texas long enough to read 'drug,' think it's wrong, and then think, "But I hear it all the time!" (A flawed system for understanding how to write properly in English if there ever was one... but it's my normal system.) I'm sitting in the coffee shop where I work, so I asked around. None of us could decide - my co-workers decided that either conjugation is valid (even grammar is relative these days). We even entertained the idea that the use of a helping verb might distinguish 'dragged' from 'drug.' Then I looked it up (because I can't go on with life without satisfying my grammatical curiosity), confirmed my initial suspicions that the past tense is indeed 'dragged' (never 'drug'!), and thought, "I've lived in Texas a long time."