Forecast, *forecasted

[From Apple’s Weather widget. Click for a larger view.]

I noticed the verb yesterday. Garner’s Modern English Usage:

forecast > forecast > forecast. So inflected. *Forecasted is a solecism that spread during the 20th century and continues to appear.

Bryan Garner puts *forecasted at Stage 2 on the GMEU Language-Change Index: “Widely shunned.” He has the ratio of forecast that to *forecasted that in print as 6:1.

But seeing *forecasted as wrong is likely to become to increasingly difficult if one sees it again and again on a screen. “Light rain expected” might solve the problem, as “Light rain forecast” looks, at least to me, like an odd use of the noun forecast.

[Yesterday was rain. Today it’s snow.]