Word: verb
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Take the sentence: "Time flies like an arrow." Instead of having the machine say, "time: subject, verb, adjective," and having the observer choose "subject" for this particular context, why can't the machine be instructed to "figure it out?" "Time flies like an arrow" is not really very different from "Fruit flies like a banana," but their diagrams are at opposite poles. In the latter, "fruit flies" are a species of fly and "like" is a verb. Why shouldn't the machine say that "time flies" are another (admittedly rarer) species...
Tynan might be right. Certainly millions of English-speaking people use it every day as verb, noun and adjective, as an expletive, an oath, and even a term of endearment. But, as Tynan quickly learned from the uproar that followed his pronouncement, there is still a considerable gap between private usage and public sensibility. The novel may reflect life, but life does not yet completely imitate fiction...
...Myles Bourke of St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y. One of the nation's most respected New Testament scholars, Bourke explains that many Protestant versions use "fellow" where Jesus' enemies speak of him contemptuously, and that the passive "He has been raised" follows the Greek verb precisely. Bourke further notes that the New Testament translation is only about half completed, and that the texts will be reviewed for style by a literary editor before they are formally published in 1968. By then, the translators feel, Catholic critics may change their minds, and take pride in having...
...positive virtue: Baldwin's autobiographical acquaintance with the Negro evangelical scene. But Amen Corner, a 14-year-old first play, scuttles edgewise through this milieu like a crab, evading dramatic life more successfully than it confronts its characters. Baldwin has yet to learn that drama is really a verb masquerading as a noun...
...excursion through the history, and past the astonishing universality, of the mother tongue. It may be enough just to discover why, from some hillbilly throats, it escapes as hit-that was how the English said it in Chaucer's time. Or that the perfectly good Anglo-Saxon verb clyppan yielded to a Norman import (embracen) and survives in English today only in the humble paper clip...