Red & Black label/sang & sung

What is the difference between Red label and Black Label Scotch? >other than the label<

Why does sing have two past forms? Both sang and sung are in the dictionary as past forms.


“All Men Are Created Equal” -Pinocchio

While not true for all cases, there are several Scotch brands that indicate aging by using a red label for “medium” aging and a black label for “greater” aging.

Some* distillers of Bourbon follow a similar trend using white, green, and black to indicate successively more aged decoctions.
sang/sung doesn’t seem to have a clear reason behind it. The original OED said that “sung” was more frequently used in the 17th and 18th centuries (but “sang” was acceptable) while, by the early 20th century, “sang” was beginning to be used more frequently in the simple past tense.

“Sung” is the only acceptable version for the past participle.

Tom~

drink, drank, drunk

sink, sank, sunk

ring, rang, rung

It’s just an old method of forming past tenses no longer used with new words. It was once common to change the vowel sound in a word rather than add a suffix. There are others:

run, ran

fly, flew

The same thing was once true of plurals:

foot, feet

mouse, mice

Nowadays we add ‘d’ or ‘ed’ to form past tenses and ‘s’ or ‘es’ to form plurals:

e-mail, e-mailed

spam, spammed

PC, PCs

television, televisions

How boring. Let’s return to the good old days. Let’s make the past tense of spam “spum”. You go first.


Let’s see. I lathered and I rinsed. But did I repeat?