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Is it just my semi-educated that made me want to use "shone" where NASA used "shined"?
Well, I guess I must be semi-edumacated too, 'cos I would have preferred shone for that too. Not sure what's right, but sure I know what I'd rather.
Hev
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Dear Max: I find myself puzzled by old irregular verbs. In the NASA quote, I look at it this way. The sun shines today, yesterday it shone. But as a transitive verb I shine my shoes once a month. I shined them last week.
So NASA was using transitive form, which seems correct. I shall not be surprised if our scholars rudely over- rule me.
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Me too, Sweet Max. What hev said.
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Traditionally the causative (read transitive) form of the verb was regular, but the intransitive was irregular. Thus: The light shone through the window but He shined the light through the window. As usual we have failed to pass these fine distinctions on in the largely self-generated grammars that we all develop in the first few years of our lives (before we are polluted by those who have some oversimplified set of rules that they seek to impose upon us) and there are some ragged edges to the applications of these rules. The proper use of to shine when the thang being operated on or doing the shining is light is on one of these ragged edges. Thus we can say something like He shone the light... but not He shone his shoes
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Agreed, Faldage. 'Shined' is transitive, 'shone' is intransitive. QED
There are other verbs which have one form for transitive and another for intransitive meanings. 'Lie" and 'Lay' come to mind, and they are two which have nearly lost the distinction between the two forms in modern USn usage.
Others, anyone?
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Lie and Lay belong to a class of words in which the transitive looks like the past tense of the intransitive. Once again, the transitive is regular and the intransitive is irregular. Another example: fall, fell, fallen vs. fell, felled, felled. My own pet theory as to why these distinctions are becoming lost in some dialects of Modern English is that the distinction between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs is handled quite adequately by the mere fact of noting whether or not the verb has an object. The same sort of thing could be said of the distinctions between such pairs as less/fewer and infer/imply.
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