Word: verb
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Play is a verb to Alan Ayckbourn, the consummate games player among modern writers for the theater. This time (in a production that brought his Scarborough company to Chicago) the stage is a time machine, carrying women 20 years forward or backward in their hectic lives. But beneath the formal ingenuity, Ayckbourn finds depth, despair and, finally, redemption. A serious farce from a man who takes comedy into the shadows...
Other slang words are truly contemporary. Robert Bork, the hapless federal judge who got clobbered by political opponents when he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, may take some grudging satisfaction in finding himself memorialized as a verb: to bork is to "attack systematically, especially in the media." Granny dumping, "the abandonment of an elderly person," is another term of recent vintage...
...would like to drag semiology in here too, for the Slickers never saw a text they couldn't subvert. But Jones' tactic was not deconstruction so much as demolition. His long-touring Musical Depreciation Revue was a frontal assault on sonic propriety. Even his nickname was an action verb, pithily expressing what the man did to music. He drove it into the ground, he impaled it on a drumstick, he laced it with aural rotgut, he deleted it from all genteel associations. He spiked...
Diversity is a term bandied about our campus with the reckless abandon that literary scholars toss around "intertextuality" or "gender" as a verb. We chair committees, establish organizations and plan events with the expressed purpose of bringing about greater "diversity" in the student population or the faculty. Diversity in this sense translates into a greater percentage of minority, female or homosexual members in the Harvard community at large...
...green room, Zlata is delighted when Rose's next guest, novelist Paul Theroux, tells her she guessed the meaning of the term correctly. The young writer sweetly offers the older author an autographed copy of her book. And she doesn't even know the meaning of the verb network...