Word: verb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...single breath, like can be used as an adjective, adverb, noun and verb. In Harvard-speak, "to be like" and "to go" are perfectly acceptable alternatives to the verb "to say." What exactly does it mean when one says, "He went like...
...Zeugma" is a literary device in which a single verb modifies two distinct objects that do not belong together--as, for example in the following passage from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock...
True, some of the hoariest complaints about German are as applicable today as they were when Twain wrote. To the student, nouns evince an urge for unification, glutinizing into tongue-wrenching heaps of meaning, while the dreaded trennbare, or separable, verbs divide into pieces -- a kind of linguistic mitosis that leaves clumps of information floating around the sentence. Finding that truffle among words, a truly regular verb that pulls no tricks in the past perfect tense and behaves in the preterit as a preterit should, is a moment of sublime pleasure -- provided that one can remember how regular verbs...
Although German prose styles tend toward relative sparseness these days, a sentence can still stretch on well beyond the patience of the English speaker. One may be left exhausted and bewildered after navigating through cascades of clauses that lead to the elusive verb at the very end that explains everything. For sheer frustration, however, little compares with the task of remembering what gender each noun is and hence whether a der (masculine), die (feminine) or das (neuter) needs to be affixed in front of it. And then, of course, there are the declensions...
...that are spelled alike and mean the same thing -- for example, person, winter and arm. Plenty of words have only slight differences: if you're nervous in English, you're nervos in German. With a little imagination, one can find any number of common roots. Take, for example, the verb to smell: riechen, from the same root as the English reeks. The malodorousness does not exist in the German word, but the odor does...