A book review in the current issue of The Atlantic mentions that the Great Depression “shrunk international trade by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932.” This probably would not have made much of an impression on me, except that I’d recently seen an article in the Financial Times about the discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s wrecked ship, which noted that the ship was found “roughly four nautical miles from the position originally recorded by Shackleton’s crew before it sunk in November 1915.”
Shrunk? Sunk? Whatever happened to shrank and sank?
I may be a bit sensitive on this subject, since I was once scolded by a teacher for using snuck in a sentence. Today, if online authorities are to be believed, snuck is considered as acceptable as, and perhaps even preferable to, sneaked. Part of me wants to track down that teacher and get her to apologize.
I understand that language constantly changes, but I find the shift from sank to sunk and shrank to shrunk — not to mention stank to stunk — especially puzzling. Why the vowel change?
Could it be because the “u” sound in sunk is easier to say than the “a” sound in “sank”? Pronouncing that “a” vowel actually does require more muscular effort — try it yourself — but that seems like an unlikely explanation, since we still say “I sang” rather than “I sung” and “I drank” rather than “I drunk,” and we all still have ankles instead of uncles. (Well, most of us have ankles and uncles, but you get the point.)
My sense is that saying “it sank” or “it shrank” sounds prissy and affected, kind of like saying “It is I” rather than “It’s me.” If I were the sort of person who described things by analogizing them to unpleasant odors, I’d probably feel much more comfortable saying “It stunk” rather than “It stank.” Still, that doesn’t account for where that air of affectation came from, and why we’d say “The beer she drank stunk” rather than “The beer she drunk stunk.”
Of course, we’re dealing here with a language in which the past tense of blink is blinked and the past tense of think is thought — in other words, a language in which nothing makes any sense. In such an environment, having the past tense of drink be drank while the past tense of slink is slunk is hardly worth remarking on.
I think that what’s really bothering me is the simple fact of being old. Where I might have to wrestle with whether shrank or shrunk is more acceptable to my readership, the copy editor at The Atlantic (who, I’m guessing, is much younger than I am) has probably never heard of shrank, and therefore has no problem.
There was a time, around 400 years ago, when a writer using the second-personal singular pronoun might have to decide whether to stay with thou or go with the newer, hipper you. People at the time had strong feelings about the issue, but now it’s something we no longer have to think about, since you won out handily. I’m guessing that in another couple of generations, language questions that we’re fretting about — such as whether it’s OK to use they as a singular pronoun — will be similarly settled, and nobody will give a sentence like “They looked at themself in the mirror” a second thought.
In the meantime, living through transitions is disturbing. I’m irritated when I see “The economy shrunk,” and even more so when I see “They looked at themself.” Unlike the vowel shift from “a” to “u,” I totally understand and support the change in the use of they — but that doesn’t make me any less upset when I hear it spoken or see it in writing. Emotional reactions are emotional reactions, and unlike language, they don’t tend to change easily or readily.
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