Nuptial Vowels

A week or so ago, one of our readers wrote to say how irritated he was to find newspapers using ‘shined’ instead of ‘shone’ as the past tense and past participle for ‘shine.’ I’m so late in responding because it turns out I’m of two minds about this matter.

On the one hand, he’s right about the grammar. More or less. Yes, usually it should be ‘shone,” though ‘shined’ is correct when the verb ‘shine’ is transitive and means ‘to polish’: “I shined my son’s shoes so he would look presentable at the birthday party, shined them so much they shone like the sun.”

Still, that trivial caveat aside, I share our reader’s irritation with public institutions that should know better, and particularly public institutions like newspapers, whose lifeblood is language, joining what seems to be a world-wide conspiracy to misuse, mangle, or generally dumb-down grammar. I remember vividly sitting in class, day after day, while Mrs. Block, my fourth-grade teacher, drilled us pitilessly on irregular verbs. Slay, slew, slain. Slink, slunk, slunk. Smite, smote, smitten. Stink, stank, stunk—how we fourth-graders loved that one, a brief moment of joy in the bleak wasteland of prescriptive grammar. Otherwise, what torture it was!

But I had to learn it and, by God, the Washington Post should learn it, too.

And yet (and here’s why I’m of two minds on this matter), why did we have to spend the entirety of fourth-grade in the painful and fruitless struggle to get irregular verbs right and, after all of that, so many of us—myself included—continue get them wrong? Well, we had to spend that much time because English makes no sense at all, particularly irregular verbs. If it’s whine, whined, whined, why shouldn’t it be shine, shined, shined? Even worse, irregular verbs aren’t regularly irregular. Why is it speak, spoke, spoken but spring, sprang, sprung? String, strung, strung but stride, strode, stridden? Or, for that matter, if it’s spring, sprang, sprung, why isn’t it string, strang, strung?

So, people who use ‘shined’ when they should use ‘shone’ are probably not ignorant rubes at all but just plain, hapless folk who instinctively want to put a modicum of order into the hopelessly irrational system that is English grammar.

That’s the first reason I pause before jumping on people who say ‘shined’ instead of ‘shone.’ Here’s the second reason. English is more than a linguistic system bound by (totally irrational) grammatical rules; it is also a system of communication bound by all sorts of complex (and totally irrational) social rules. For instance, if I go upstairs to get a brief nap and, when I come down, Barbara asks me where I was, I say, “I lay down for a nap.” But my voice always catches before I say “lay.” In part it’s because my mind is making a rapid grammatical calculation (“Shouldn’t it be laid like any other self-respecting verb?) but mostly it’s because my mind is making a social calculation, too (“Won’t Barbara think me insufferably pretentious if I speak like an English professor?).

So the long and short of it is that I don’t know what to conclude—except that I hope my daughter doesn’t read this posting. After so mercilessly getting on her case for saying “Kelly and me were thinking that…,” she’ll never get off my back.

–Dennis