Same reason it’s a “Po’ Boy” and not a “Poor Boy”. That’s how the word’s pronounced in the local dialect where the food was created.
Duh.
Isn’t it just part of everyone’s dumbing down of the English language? I increasingly see things like,
“I use to think this, but now I think that”
“Handheld image has produce shallow DoF.”
“Propose demolition by others”
All of which are missing the obvious “d”. I even spotted this exact same thing on the NASA website during the last Shuttle mission. The running clock on the Shuttle/ISS page says “Mission elapse time” above it. It makes my skin crawl.
Oof! Another brilliant hypothesis slain by skimming Wikipedia.
Hawaiian pidgin is the result of multiple ethnicities being thrown together and having to develop a common language in order to function alongside one another. You’re almost guaranteed to spawn an linguistic abomination in that kind of setting.
I can be pretty pedantic, and I opposed Hawaiian pidgin being taught in schools when it was proposed years ago. But when a language considers “we wen go make da kine li’dat ova dea” a perfectly grammatical and comprehensible sentence, it’s pretty obvious that you can’t really hold it to any familiar standards of, well, anything.
What would you say instead of daylight savings time?
“Daylight Saving Time” - no extra “s”.
Do those of you annoyed by these absences also get bothered that it is a “race car” and not a “racing car”?
I’ve said this before in GQ, and I’ll say it again: There isn’t an such thing as “lazy” or “dumbed down” language. All languages evolve and anyone who thinks he speaks perfect English is using words and phrases that would be considered “wrong” a hundred years or so ago.
Also, pidgin, as a language, isn’t supposed to comprehensible to English speakers. The fact that it isn’t is not a reflection on its validity as a language in its own right.
I’m just trying to understand if “shave ice” is part of a grammatically consistent pattern within pidgin, or if it’s just a one-off thing like you can find in any language. I’m not implying that it’s wrong even though it sounds awkward to my ear. But then, I don’t live in Hawai’i, and I don’t speak pidgin.
For the foods that contain verbs in the names, it seems shave ice is the exception. I’ve had steamed dumplings, chopped steak, fried rice and stuffed cabbage, not steam dumplings, chop steak, fry rice, and stuff cabbage.
Skim(med) milk has already been mentioned, and I’m sure there must be others.
Oddly enough, I have never heard of “shave ice.”
I must disagree. We think Matsumoto is the superior of the two, but Waiola’s quality may have declined only in recent years. On our most recent trip to Hawaii, in 2005, we were both surprised at how bland the Waiola product was. Clearly not how we remembered it.
Matsumoto was much better, at least on that trip. I committed something of a faux pas when I was chatting with the lady of the current generation who owns the place. They sell T-shirts, and one of them seemed too bear her likeness. I commented on that, but it seems that was, er, her father. (In my defense, she did look like a little old Japanese man.)
It is possible they went downhill. I was back there around two years ago and I don’t think I had a shave ice. I did have like six* pork hash* though.
At least you didn’t have the hashed pork. 
In the South, we have some similar constructions: ice tea, fry bread, chop salad, can biscuits (or the more amusing name of whop biscuits.)
It is a “racing car” though, at least around here. It’s also “Shaved Ice”, too.
No. A race care is a car that is sometimes used for racing. A racing car is a car that is racing right now.
Why fresh squeezed orange juice and not freshLY squeezed orange juice?
And how come no one can remember that it’s bumbled bees?
I wonder if another contributing factor is the influence of East Asian languages, whether on Hawaiian Pidgin itself, or on the way some of the people speak English. Chinese and Korean* don’t inflect verbs for tense, but rely on adverbial constructions to denote past, present, or future. So when native speakers of those languages haven’t quite mastered English grammar, what stands out most when they speak English is that the /d/ or /t/ past tense marking is often omitted.
Voila, “shave ice”.
*IIRC wrt Korean.
And why do so many people forget the “d” in “iced cream”?