"Strew, strewed, strewn"

[Wilson Gray]

My feelings exactly. Don't you hate (it) [sigh! remember when the
presence of this "it" was so mandatory that no prescriptive rule
regarding its use was necessary?] when the language changes right under
your feet, so to speak, and you're forced to remember that your concept
of "correct" and "proper" English is based on that of 19th-century
writers, whereas we're now in the 21st century?

-Wilson

On Oct 4, 2004, at 1:59 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Strew, strewed, strewn"
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> At 11:39 AM -0400 10/4/04, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> On Oct 4, 2004, at 11:05 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>>
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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
>