Word: nouns
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...scenes are written in grunting prose that is supposed to be tough but instead is only sweaty, and its largo passages are flaccid with maundering soliloquies of the hero, a professor of literature who is awakening gummy-eyed from a dark night of the soul. Baker never writes a noun without leashing a seeing-eye adjective to it, never overlooks a cliché, never fails to labor an image ("The windshield wiper describing its captive arc back and forth, back and forth, like that descending knife in the story of the pit and the pendulum...
Alfred North Whitehead--himself an adorable genius--applies that term to James in Science and the Modern World. The aptness of the adjective is beyond question; the the truth of the noun, nearly so. For, though James lacked the light-shattering ingenuity of Newton and the monumental style of Kant, his gifts were nonetheless striking. His writings abound in magnificent arrays of quotable passages. His works teem with provocative insights--too many, perhaps, ever to be fully systematized. But, most of all, James radiates moral greatness. His openness of mind and eagerness to defend underdogs, his freedom from vanity...
...first of these Mavericks was another Samuel, one of the great cattlemen of the nineteenth century who, leaving his cattle unbranded, made "maverick" a common as well as a proper noun. His grandson Maury Maverick was a controversial Texas Congressman and reform-minded mayor of San Antonio; Maury Maverick, Jr., is a lawyer, writer, and leading spokesman for the Texas liberal movement...
...word 'Jew' is a noun," he advised, "and should never be used as an adjective or verb. To speak of 'Jew girls' or 'Jew stories' is both objectionable and vulgar. The use of the word Jew as a verb-'to Jew down'-is a slang survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether...
Relax and look up the word reverend in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). You and your Protestant clergymen are hopelessly behind the times. The word reverend has graduated to the category of a noun, "rev'er-end-n-s: a member of the clergy: minister, priest, pastor . . . (saw the Reverend walking down the road)." Call me Reverend...