Word: verb
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Look at the Harlequins! purports to be a writer's memoirs, an "oblique autobiography," although at times the mask slips and we find ourselves looking over the narrator's shoulder at his memoirs-in-progress: "I was eighteen when the Bolshevist revolution struck--a strong and anomalous verb, I concede, used here solely for the sake of narrative rhythm." Sometimes, indeed, the effect is rather witty...
...world's greatest verbal prudes seem to be the Nupe of West Africa, a tribe that does not have a native word for defecate, menstruation or semen. For sexual intercourse, they are forced to borrow from Arabic a chaste verb meaning "to connect...
Today the roughly 2,000,000 Basques are an industrious, aggressive people, with a passion for gambling, especially during Sunday matches of jai alai. They speak a highly inflected language, which has some 175 verb suffixes and is unrelated to any Indo-European tongue. Those who live on the French side of the border are poor agricultural people, and many of them have been moving to Paris, Bordeaux and other cities. But the four Basque provinces of Spain (Vizcaya, Álava, Guipúzcoa and Navarra) are among the country's richest. Through the centuries many Basques have gone...
...oceans. The pull of the distant sun also influences the tides, and when the orbits of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun bring all three bodies roughly into line, the tidal changes are much larger than usual. These "spring" tides (named for the verb rather than the season) occur twice a month: when the moon is full and when it is new. Spring tides themselves may be driven to further extremes when the elliptical path of the moon brings it closest to the earth's surface, increasing the effect of lunar gravity...
...last sentence and then prints it in italics, as though that gives it greater shock value. Also repellent at first is the man's habit of stuffing his leisurely, Latinate sentences to repletion with adjectives and adverbs to modify, often tautologically, a stark noun or gruesome verb...