Word: verb
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...that Monday stanza , a lady psychologist used a four-letter verb which Boston viewers probably had never heard uttered on the air in 21 previous years of local television. Because the telecast was 'live,' there was no way of blipping it out. The damage was done...
...WHEN used honestly, "to liberate" is a reflective verb...
...hangman's noose would have been the appropriate end for Elyot, Shakespeare, Smollett, Southey, Newman, Washington Irving, Darwin and William Morris (of Morris chair fame, not the dictionary's editor). Edmund Spenser should perhaps have been flogged for anticipating the TVese use of host as a transitive verb. Since advise in the sense of "notify" is business and Army English, Willa Gather and Sir Richard Steele must have been members of the industrial-military complex. And since erratas reflects ignorance of Latin, Jonathan Swift was the Dean of ignoramuses. How good that we now have concerned and learned...
Bastard Twins. Asked about the use of host as a transitive verb, as when Johnny Carson "hosts" the Tonight Show, Princeton Historian Eric F. Goldman wrote: "This is TVese and public-relationese, hardly an improvement over the English language." On the use of like as a conjunction, like in the Winston cigarette syndrome, Writer John Kiernan commented: "Such things as these persuade me that the death penalty should be retained." Isaac Asimov, the lucid science writer, also denounced finalize as "nothing more than bureaucratic illiteracy-the last resort of the communicatively untalented...
...word farce comes from a Latin verb meaning "to stuff." Too often film farces are crammed with top-of-the-lungs comedians and bottom-of-the-gag-file comedy. The Devil by the Tail fills its hour and a half with sly performances and wry wit. It is the stuff of life-and of laughter...