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journeyman
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She "lighted" a cigarette...She "lit" a cigarette????
All the books I read or taped books I listen to invariably say "lighted". These are mostly mysteries. What is wrong with "lit"? Obviously I didn't hold up hand when asked if I wanted to know about grammer,etc...to late to ask forgiveness!
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Carpal Tunnel
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My dictionary says "lit" is an alternative for "lighted". I don't see any important choice between them.
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Pooh-Bah
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I agree with Bill on this. My own choice would be guided entirely by which sounded best to me at the time.
I have noticed, over the past ten or fifteen years, that this alternative construction has been carried over (usually, but not always in a jocular vein) to other words. So, one is neither "frighted" nor "frightened", but "frit". Which, I suppose, makes the agent of afright a "fritter"
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addict
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My preference for "lit" is entirely phonological. It is sharp and immediate, much like turning lights on with a switch or striking a match. 
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Dear RC: Careful about frit. It is used in ceramics for some of the materials used. So don't fritter away your energies on it. I'd be frightened to eat your fritter, lest an afrit be released. wwh
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Pooh-Bah
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Dear Bill, I will be careful: I would hate to cause a rift between us - the very thought gives me terrif. pain. I will give very serious thought before I include it in my tarif. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear RC: Indeed the Mid-Alantic rift is rift enough between us.
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Pooh-Bah
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But it would be as nothing if I weren't frit of flying!
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old hand
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I am surprised...I don't think I would ever say "lighted". I didn't even know it was a "real word". The exclusive use of "lit" must be some strange Canadian thing...or western Canadian thing...I don't really know. [shrug]
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Dear Bean: You have lighted a fire under me. But I will be delighted by its warmth. Just now a mockingbird alighted on the telephone wire outside me window. All the birds here are flighted. Not an ostrich in sight, I plight my troth.
I am benighted enough to use both "lit" and "lighted."
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old hand
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> I have noticed, over the past ten or fifteen years, that this alternative construction has been carried over (usually, but not always in a jocular vein) to other words. So, one is neither "frighted" nor "frightened", but "frit". Which, I suppose, makes the agent of afright a "fritter"I'm always applying this concept to "freak out", i.e. "She fruck out when she discovered that her boyfriend hadn't fed the cat for 3 days." So would that make the person responsible for freaking someone out a "frucker"? 
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old hand
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You have lighted a fire under me. But I will be delighted by its warmth. Just now a mockingbird alighted on the telephone wire outside me window. All the birds here are flighted. Not an ostrich in sight, I plight my troth.Dear wwh: I should learn to make my posts clearer. Because the weirdest part is that I admit to the use of delighted, alighted, flighted (but that's an adjective). But, for some strange reason, my mouth and brain resist just "lighted" when "lit" is "correct" in my mind! Why oh why? 
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veteran
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We're all presuming that both words are a preterite for the verb "light". This may be a personal idiosyncracy, but I feel there is a difference between "light" meaning illumine, illuminate and meaning kindle, set fire to. To me, 'lighted' goes with the former, 'lit' with the latter. I would never say, "She lighted the fire before dark." But I would say, "The fire lit up the room enough to read by," which contradicts what I just finished saying, so it's not hard and fast. I would say, "He lit the lamp and lighted up the room." (Lighting a lamp, even an electric one, is the same as setting fire to a candle- or lampwick, as any orthodox Jew could tell you.)
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journeyman
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I am surprised...I don't think I would ever say "lighted". I didn't even know it was a "real word". The exclusive use of "lit" must be some strange Canadian thing...or western Canadian thing...I don't really know. [shrug]
Don't feel left out. "Lighted" just sounds wrong to my ears also, and you know where I came from. (Even if delighted, etc. doesn't give me fits)
Ali
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You can add me to the litter of exclusive litters.
Bingley
Bingley
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I think the duplication is just part of a tendency to drop the vowel change to indicate tense change and use "-ed" instead."I seed him" instead of "I saw him".
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...just one of the cats  !
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Québec seems to be on same footing as rest of Canada. Never is the word lighted used, only lit. Ha, it is probably the only time all provinces agree on something. (inside joke for Canadians)
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enthusiast
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I think this might be one of those cases where English has distinct punctative vs durative in the past tense: The house burnt down last week, but it burned all night. I dreamt of it on Monday, but turned in my sleep while I dreamed. Where there are two past forms, the one that takes longer to say (-d rather than -t) tends to be used to indicate on-going activity, while the shorter is used for the action regarded as an event at a single time.
I hadn't thought of lit vs lighted in this way, but although I normally say 'lit', when I try to make a sentence using 'lighted' it seems to be durative: Jackie's arrival lit up the room, but her presence lighted up the room. A light switch lit it up, a lamp lighted it up.
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Dear NicholasW: I wish I knew enough to have said that.
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journeyman
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Ha, it is probably the only time all provinces agree on something. (inside joke for Canadians)I don't think I agree with that. Ali
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So far Nick, your explaination make the most sense to-- but durative? I would have thought it was a gerund--
I lit the lamp at the door, and it the lighted the way up the stairs to the door.
(but i might have used illuminated-- but as i say it, its sounds, oh i don't know, overdone? to fancy a word?)
So now enlighten me, how is durative different from a gerund? (do gerunds have to end in ing-- and lighting-- the lighting in the room was harsh-- well that not a gerund...its a noun... so what is the gerund form of light? (I am at a loss-- can lighting be used as verb? I can't think of a sentance right now...)
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Anonymous
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I'd forgotten all about the term "gerunds".
Would an example of lighting as a gerund would be something like a decription of the traditional candle lighting ceremony in a Christian wedding? "The lighting of the unity candle represents a joining of the two"
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ger·und
ger·und (jĕr'ənd)
n. (Abbr. ger.) Grammar.
In Latin, a noun derived from a verb and having all case forms except the nominative.
In other languages, a verbal noun analogous to the Latin gerund, such as the English form ending in -ing when used as a noun, as in singing in We admired the choir's singing.
ge·run'di·al (jə-rŭn'dç-əl) adj.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992, 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
But isn't it a bit more complicated in actual English (rather than the Let's-Pretend-It's-Really-Latin of so many prescriptivists)? Surely lighting is a gerundial form of a word that was originally a noun that was then verbed...
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veteran
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Mav's question about gerunds
OfTroy -- aren't you glad you asked? I gather that "durative" is a verb tense used in Asiatic languages which has no real counterpart in Indo-European languages (except maybe the aorist tenses in classical Greek).
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Thanks Mav, but i would say agerund is a verb that expresses a continuing state of being--
as I can't go fishing today, I didn't go fishing yesterday, and i won't go fishing tomorrow-- our favorite fishing hole has a new sign-- No Fishing
No Fishing means no fishing now, and no fishing tomorrow, no fishing ever-- a continues state of being--
but in i won't go fishing today-- fishing is not gerund--since it is limited to "today"
So, yeah, the idea of lighting a candle of unity to commemerate joining (joined today, joined tomorrow, joined forever)-- a continues state of being! is a gerund.
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>Surely lighting is a gerundial form of a word that was originally a noun that was then verbed
Seems very convoluted. Can you give me more examples. Would the same be true for bat, batting, batting?
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fishing is not gerund--since it is limited to "today"My understanding is that a gerund is a word that has the quality of a verbal noun. In other words, it is a name for describing the state of doing something. So I would have figured: A fish = noun (name of an object/animal) To fish = verb (formed from the elided concept of ‘catching a fish’) Fishing = gerund (the continuing action of the verb-from-the-noun) That would have led me to find no difference between your two examples of ‘fishing’ – but I think it does still get something of your idea of an ongoing action, doesn’t it? (and BTW good for you with your outlook on teaching yourself – that’s just what I’m doing here!)And belM, yes, though my initial way of trying to get at this way in which we stretch one form of word into another form was convoluted, I do think bat and batting is just the same. You could trace the same effect anytime a verb has been formed from the name of an object: say, root - rooting, shoe - shoeing, ball -
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Well it Bel, bat, batting, batting works for that stuff you do with a balls, in sports arenas.. but since i am not a sports fan, when i first read it-- i was puzzled-- and a quick glance and M-W 10th didn't help--since it only gives bat/batting as some thing done in a ball field (or seperately as an mammal)
(tsuwm-- oh, wondererous one with the OED handy, please help on this!)
to me Bat is a roll of wool-- and batting is a soft mat of wool (well, acutally now, poly fil, though i do have 1 wool quilt). It is the stuff that gets stuffed into the middle of a quilt! and it never gets made into a verb-- one never bats a quilt with batting-- and quilts are never batting! (but they do contain batting)
you begin to see just how strange i am-- a three letter word, taught in a primer- and i get it wrong-- or at least different! i am sure that i learned bat (as in baseball bat) first, and later at some point in my life bat (as in a roll of wool) later became the primary defination.
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I think one of the lovely things, Helen, about the conversations on this board is that it allows us all to consider how 'strange' we each are - unique in our similarity, or vice versa! I like this a lot; never visit here without learning something (even bloody recipes !)
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Dear maverick: could a "bloody recipe" be palatable?
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Depends on your attitude to tripe, blood pudding et al, hence the wink Bill
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This is from rbarr, the resident linguist on another board. It is in answer to a question about shined/shone but the principle is the same. Reprinted with permission.
The course is "Structure of English," and we've been covering issues like this all term. In my last lecture, in fact, I discussed the creation of new irregular past tenses, like pled, snuck, dug, stuck, knit, all of which used to be regular verbs: pleaded, sneaked, digged, sticked, knitted. It's fascinating, Commentator, that you think "they just don't sound right." It shows that there is more going on in the mental lexicon than just rules for regulars, vs. memorized lists for irregulars.
The problem with shined is a little different. Historically, causatives of intransitive verbs were automatically regular, even if the base verbs were irregular. This is the source of the distinction between, for example, intransitive lie, lay, have lain (irregular), and regular transitive lay, laid, have laid "cause to lie."
This is also the source of the difference between hung and hanged. Originally, the intransitive was hang, hung, have hung (irregular) : "The wet clothes hung on the line." The regular transitive was hang, hanged, have hanged 'cause to hang,' as in "They hanged Danny Deever in the morning." However, the identity of the present tense between the two verbs hang has caused the regular transitive hanged to die out and be replaced by the irregular hung everywhere except in the special case of executing a person. So now one can also say, transitively, "They hung the wet clothes on the line."
This is the current problem with shined. The intransitive has always been irregular: shine, shone, have shone [pronounced 'shon' if you're British or Canadian], as in "The light shone from behind the stained-glass window." The transitive would have been regular: shine, shined, shined 'cause to shine', as in "He shined his shoes." There has been some mixing of forms, though. You still can't say "*He shone his shoes," but many standard dialects now permit the irregular form for light: "He shone a light through the window." Now we see that shined is crossing over into the intransitive use as well: "Never have two women shined so brightly."
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journeyman
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have noticed, over the past ten or fifteen years, that this alternative construction has been carried over (usually, but not always in a jocular vein) to other words. So, one is neither "frighted" nor "frightened", but "frit". Which, I suppose, makes the agent of afright a "fritter"
Though the queen had slit him in the past, when he showed his true worth, she rit her error and duly knit him.
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