Why do people get bought and brought mixed up?

[Starllight]

A Monday morning irk of mine… Surely people know the difference?

Bought - past tense of buy

Brought - past tense of bring

As a side note, where I now live in Scotland I have never come across anyone get this mixed up. Perhaps that’s why it irks me when I see it?!

YABU - They’re both very similar and easy to get them mixed up
YANBU - It looks/sounds completely ridiculous when people use ‘brought’ instead of bought

Surely it's "she came over to your house"??

I don’t see taught/thought written as an error in Ireland — said, sure, but that’s just because some accents don’t pronounce ‘th’ so it’s tought/taught. Sorry, that sounds very confused. I just mean it’s not that some people are confusing the past tense of to think with the past sense of to teach, they just pronounce them the same.

In England, I think it’s learned behaviour. There is an entire section of society which has learned written language not from books or newspapers that have been copy-edited and proofed, but from parts of the internet also populated by poorly-educated, not very fluent writers. They thus learn errors. Confusing bought and brought is essentially a meme.

See also the misuse of ‘yourself’. It started off with a couple of characters on The Apprentice who kept bleating ‘That would be myself, Lord Sugar’ in the boardroom because they thought it was more ‘correct’ than ‘It was I’ or ‘Me, Lord Sugar’ or ‘I did it’, and now it’s spread, because the kind of people who get their syntax from reality shows don’t often have corrective sources elsewhere. So now, depressingly, everyone on The Traitors is say8ng ‘I voted for yourself, Dan’, including a 37 year old English teacher.

I am the same. I am Scottish and had never heard this until an English person started at work. Then when I moved to England everyone was saying it. Got my self into trouble if I ever questioned where they brought it from. Sounds so stupid when people write or say it.

No it’s not

It's one of those things I'd never even noticed - that the words were so similar until I heard people mixing them up. I guess because it's usually obvious from context (or it really doesn't matter; "I brought wine!". So mentally the two words never overlapped. But I can see that in some people's brains they spark the same bit of brain or whatever and get conflated. A bit like if you say cat/kitty my brain interprets the same idea for two different words.