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The Random/Weird/Quirky Photo Thread


EdgarTheSlouch

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Ronnie - shineys or shinies?

Up to you, I'd say. It's not exactly a word with an established history ;)

 

I think it's historically the case with -ey to create a plural by adding -s. It's certainly true for valley, monkey, donkey, attorney and anything else I can think of. With newer words I think a lot of us apply the approach 'y becomes ie' (cries, flies, allies) without twigging that the rule doesn't apply if there's an 'e' before the 'y' and so we end up with bogeys/bogies, smileys/smilies and shineys/shinies. Visually I prefer the newer forms.

But hold on, surely there's no e in shiny.

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But hold on, surely there's no e in shiny.

Not in the adjective, no. But the noun, coined I imagine within the last few decades because of sticker albums, seems to have one, at least by 'feel' in my opinion. The same is true for another new word; we have the the adjective smily, but if you're applying it as a noun to talk about emoticons then usage dictates that you use smiley, short for smily face (where smily is an adjective and face a noun).

 

I'm not saying there's a quotable rule about these things (we don't write rules anymore) but simply consensus, which seems to be that if we in the modern day coin a new noun imitating an adjective ending in -y, then that noun has -ey on the end. Try to find examples of the noun 'smily' - they'll be few and far between, drowned under a 'smiley' wave.

 

I can't think of many recent examples beyond smiley and Pitcos's shiney to demonstrate it further, but I think that if slang were introduced such that someone with Parkinson's was referred to by a noun adapted from the adjective shaky, then people would naturally write it as "Nah, that Michael J Fox isn't a real shakey. He's exaggerating for a Democratic campaign commercial."

 

It could be that this is a recent emergence, maybe explaining why we see a thug referred to as a heavy (the usage dates back to the nineteenth century) rather than a heavey, though there's room to suggest that heavey might not have come about anyway because the addition of an 'e' changes the pronunciation of the vowel-sound 'ea' (from short to long). That 'e' doesn't in shaky/shakey, shiny/shiney or smily/smiley because each of those three have long vowels in them in the first place.

 

If you can find other examples by all means point to them and we'll see whether we can refine things any further. Maybe the formula is "adjective with a long vowel and ending in -y -> noun in -ey". If you can think of an adjective in -y that has a short vowel (as I did with 'heavy') but doesn't have a noun form pronounced the same, then we'll know whether it holds.

Edited by Ronnie
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