Word: verb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...term hopefully drew a pithy rebuke: "This once useful adverb meaning 'with hope' has been distorted and is now widely used to mean 'I hope' or 'it is to be hoped.' Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly." He gave "finalize" even shorter shrift: "A pompous, ambiguous verb." Funny was a word that should also be held at arm's length: "Nothing becomes funny by being labeled...
Business correspondence should be simple and brief, Baldrige declares. She proudly reports that soon after her brother, Malcolm Baldrige, became Secretary of Commerce in 1981, he programmed the department's word processors to reject such business jargon as "to prioritize," "bottom line" and "impact" used as a verb. The smart business executive meticulously manages what may seem to be minor concerns. Writes Baldrige: "Details linked together create a strong, effective executive presence that propels an individual upward in his or her career...
...death approached, Grant wrote a note to his physician that contained a subtle and accurate conceit: "The fact is that I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to % suffer. I signify all three." What Grant said about his dying was true of his life. It was only as a verb, that is, as a warrior, that he found focus. Grant had an animal sense of moment and motion. Mary Lincoln thought for a time during the siege of Richmond that Grant was a mere "butcher...
Some Spanglish sentences are essentially English with a couple of Spanish words thrown in ("Do you have cold cerveza?"). Others are basically Spanish in structure with Hispanicized words borrowed from English ("Donde esta el vacuum cleaner?"). The confluence of the two languages is also producing new verb forms that are not found in any textbook. "Quieres monkear?" is one way of saying "Want to hang out?" Borrowed from the slang infinitive "to monkey around," the Spanglish verb monkear is used in the same way as truckear, which refers to working around trucks, shopear (i.e., at the market) and mopear...
Such verbal interplay is made possible by a parser, the part of the computer program that interprets players' commands. The first adventure-style programs contained parsers capable only of responding to simple noun-verb combinations such as Go north, Take sword, or Kill troll. In the late 1970s, however, Marc Blank, who is now a vice president at Infocom, and a colleague at M.I.T.'s lab for computer science, devised more sophisticated parsers with the aid of an artificialintelligence language called MDL (pronounced mud-dle). Then, in 1979, Blank and newly formed Infocom released Zork I, the first...