THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300047
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 54 lines
Let all who love the language join to save from extinction the word ``shone.'' The past tense of the verb ``shine.''
In most dictionaries, even now, ``shone'' still comes first, before ``shined,'' but on radio and television and in conversations ``shined'' is displacing ``shone'' - which is setback to felicitous discourse and hurtful to the vocabulary of poets.
May I give you an example?
Which of these two sentences is more agreeable?
1. The sun shined on the possum.
2. The sun shone on the possum.
To me, shone wins.
``Shined'' has a thin, weak sound.
But ``shone,'' thanks in part to the long-drawn vowel ``o-o-o-o'' following the arresting, ``shh'' and winding up on the crooning ``n'' sound, is sonorous, full-bodied, strong. A word to brace the spirit.
To say ``shone'' is a pleasure. You see the shaft of sunlight falling on the deceitful possum, who is playing dead.
Aware of the steep decline of ``shone'' in usage, even though holding its own in dictionaries, I felt at odds in my own country, especially with gifted young colleagues who are sometimes misled by a newspaper stylebook that is more often wrong than right.
Imagine my delight when a reader, Rosamond Refo of Norfolk, voiced displeasure with the trend to ``shined.'' I shook her hand.
By St. George, we who are prone to shone are not alone!
That very day I met Professor Donna Reiss, former director of the grammar hotline at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach and a national consultant in teaching teachers how to enhance instruction with computers.
She remembered that ``shone'' is in the hymn about Good King Wenceslas. Sunday, I stopped at a nearby Episcopal church to seek the Good King in a hymnal. To my astonishment it did not contain titles of the hymns. They were just numbered.
Alas, the Episcopal hymns, many of them unsingable, are also unfindable. They are grouped under holy days. A check of every one in the Christmas assemblage did not turn up Wenceslas.
I sought the advice of Elizabeth Pentecost, who plays hymns on the piano for fun and on request at church. ``Shone,'' she remarked, ``is a thick word.''
Further, she recalled the opening lines:
Good King Wenceslas/ looked out on the feast of Stephen/ when the snow lay round about/ deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night/ tho' the frost was cruel/ when a poor man came in sight/ gath'ring winter fuel.
Do you see how the moon shone on the snow so deep and crisp and even?
Wonder how that tune goes. by CNB