"Strew, strewed, strewn"

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:39 AM -0400 10/4/04, Wilson Gray wrote:
>On Oct 4, 2004, at 11:05 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU>
>>Subject:      Re: "Strew, strewed, strewn"
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>>
>>Nice!  This reminds me of "shine, shone, shone," where "shone" is
>>pronounced by me as [Son] but by many others as [SOn], or maybe [San]
>
>Welcome to St. Louis, Bev! Actually, there's a dialect split. Some
>people in St. Louis say [Son] and others say [SOn/San]. Still others
>drop back five yards and punt by using "shined." But, to me, that's way
>weirder than [SOn/San], unless it's being used transitively, as in
>"shined his shoes."
>
I don't have anything but [Son] for the past tense of the
intransitive, no shone-as-in-Sean, but I too have always made the
distinction Wilson mentions between intr. "shone" and trans. "shined"
and have thus used this as an example in class, only to discover that
most of the students use "shined" for both.  Very disconcerting and
old-fartifying.

Larry