Never heard the idea that the different meanings have different past tenses. (There is one word like that, “hang”, with “hanged” and “hung” as past tenses, but that’s a relatively recent idea.) I use “shined” for both, though I don’t find myself using the past tense of that verb much at all (which is, of course, why the strong verb version is disappearing.) I imagine that most of the time, a speaker will use either one form or the other, or perhaps both, randomly; I doubt very many speakers make a distinction on meaning, though.
A lot of our old strong verbs are becoming gradually regularized. Then again we’ve decided to treat some of our old weak verbs as strong verbs - hence “snuck” instead of “sneaked” (I believe this is exclusively an Americanism - I don’t think it’s caught on in Ol’ Blighty yet.)
Misspelling. People very frequently pronounce it that way (though I don’t) and I imagine many simply forget the proper spelling.
Some women are stupid.
Too many Hugh Grant movies and not enough actually talking to English people. What’s dreadful to my ears is the spread of quite a number of phonetic changes that originated in Cockney (or, as it’s actually-factually called in the literature today, “Saaf Lunnon”) into middle-class London speech. Like the loss of /l/ in syllable codas, so that “milk” is pronounced “miwk”. I’ve heard “th” pronounced /f/ in middle-class London accents as well. shudder
My husband - an American by birth and upbringing - lived in England for six months. He reports that an American accent (Midwest/Chicago in his case) has a similar effect on English women.
He reports that Scottish women don’t stop at the floor-slapping panties and thank Og he had a car for a quick getaway.
Oh, well, if you want to talk about pronunciation, that a whole other kettle of fish, what with our Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and what not ancestry. Who was it, George Bernard Shaw, who said that with English pronuniation, “ghoti” should be pronunced “fish”?
gh = “sh” sound, as in “cough”
o = “i” sound, as in “women”
ti = “sh” sound, as in “nation”
I don’t recall ever having the rule set forth to me, but my impression as a native speaker was that “shone”, should only be used for intransitive senses. For example,
The sun shone brightly that day.
but I shined my shoes yesterday
and I shined my flashlight at the wheel so they could change the tire
The sun shined brightly sounds wrong to me, although others may think that “shone” is old fashioned.
There are a number of verbs–often German-English cognates–that similarly are regular or irregular depending on whether the sense is transitive or intransitive. Allowing, of course, for the fact that in German the transitive and intransitive forms may be slightly different, and in English the transitive-sense rule may only be applied in one special case. For example, for the verb to hang, in English it is irregular in all senses except that of executing someone by hanging. (Not that any English-speaking jurisdiction executes convicts by hanging, IIRC.) German, IIRC has hangen, which is irregular and intransitive, but verhangen, which is transitive and regular.
Something which annoys me is the assumption that all ‘mispronunciations’ originate from London accents and are otherwise alien. To use your example, “miwk” isn’t a bad approximation of a truly Suffolk accent, which you’ll mostly hear only from elder generations.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and earn the ire of many by saying that shined is always wrong. You may have someone shine your shoes (if you are in america and they are incapable of polishing them) but afterwards they are shiny, or have been polished. They are not shined, nor have they been shone. It’s like betterified - it might seem sensible and logical, but it’s just incorrect.
Probably for no good reason other than a local dialect in 3rd century Saxony or Wessex or whatever, but it’s still wrong. Give it another 150 years and it will be correct, but for now please try to avoid shined.
I’m going to tinker a little more with three things that have been answered already. I hope I don’t get into trouble.
Not surprisingly, (folklore, y’know) I heard exactly the opposite. One of the guys who broadcasts the Chicago White Sox games on WGN-TV explained it this way. In baseball, it’s a pop fly ball that falls right in a fielder’s glove where he was standing. In the old grocery stores, where the manager would take your order and go get it himself, some had a long pole with a hook for the high shelves. He could snag a can of corn off the top shelf, and it would drop right into his hand.
Antisemitism. The Semites are the group that gave rise to both the Jews and the Arabs (descendants of Shem, or something.) Today, antisemitic usually means anti-Jewish, but when an arab hates a Jew, is that really antisemitism? Sometimes, I wonder.
Episcopal. An episcopal clergyman explained to me, the word means that their church has bishops. Maybe that why the accent is on the second syllable. Or maybe not.
It actually means something more like “and there you have it,” or “and it’s as simple as that.” Kind of like putting Q.E.D. at the end of a mathematical proof.
It’s embarrassing to be caught out passing misinformation. Sorry, I’ve been on the board for a while, but I’ve never seen this one here. Could someone provide a link so I can cure my ignorance?
