Thanks for that, David. I’ve come across ‘shew’ as an alternative to ‘show’ in old books and the like. I could have taken it for some naïve attempt at ultra-correctness, or an affectation of delicacy, only there’s also ‘shewbread’ in the King James Bible.
Sometimes in my proofreading work authors make naïve and hard-to-read attempts to represent ‘olde worlde’ English, which only tries readers’ patience, irks the eye and slows the pace. As a rule I give them a hint about the KISS principle, as I call it: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Archaic affects are best kept vestigial so as to cue the reader’s imagination, to which the rest can be left. A simple means to this end is to put hyphens back into words that have lost them, for instance ‘schoolboy’ and ‘overnight’ in Victorian English were printed ‘school-boy’ and ‘over-night’. This makes clear that a passage is meant to come from an earlier age ( a letter a character is reading, say) yet still scans well. Then in Jacobean and Stuart English, if memory serves, an initial capital was a common alternative to italicising a word and -est was used at the end of polysyllabic adjectives, and ‘quit’ in the modern American sense was once common in UK English ( surviving only in our legal expression ‘quit rent’), and so on.
I shall remember ‘shew’ as a further way of shewing this, thank you.
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The verb used to be weak so should have finished up with the past participle “showed” not the strong “shown”.
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I’m under the impression that vastly bucks the trend, over the centuries. How common would you say a weak-to-strong change is?
‘Shined’ instead of ‘shone’ drives me nuts, and I’ve noticed ‘thrived’ seems to be taking over from both ‘throve’ and ‘thriven’, which I find sad. I feel English loses colour and dynamism with this slither towards the same-old weak declension, and any other kind of levelling.
