Word: verbes
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When Ulysses Grant was dying of throat cancer in 1885, he wrote an oddly interesting note to his doctor: "I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be, to do, to suffer. I signify all three." Bush seems to be a kind of verb, or at least two-thirds of a verb, the doing and being part - an ordinary man perhaps, but given to common sense and fitted for action. That's the most favorable reading of him. But Gore, which part of speech is he? Pronoun? Half a dozen...
...they're not so far from the pains we in the "real" world face every day. But this is a fault that can easily be forgiven in a play as delightfully outrageous as Idiots. It's not just any production that can end with a prolonged and improbable verb conjugation and still rightfully call itself entertaining...
Even children do it. Told that a man likes to wug, they will say yesterday he wugged. Children are not sponges; they're constantly creating sentences and words, never more clearly or charmingly than when they encounter the second flavor of verb, the quirky irregulars. The past tense of spring is sprang, but the past of cling is not clang but clung, and the past of bring is neither brang nor brung but brought. English has 180 irregulars, a ragtag list that kids simply must memorize...
...irregulars are vulnerable too because they depend on fallible memory. If a verb declines in popularity, speakers may not hear its irregular form often enough to fix it securely in memory. They fall back on -ed, changing the language for following generations. That is why forms from Chaucer's time such as chide-chid and writhe-wrothe turned into chided and writhed...
...they know some people, especially parents, are put off by the particular verb on the T-shirts. "We try to be sensitive to that. When I see kids coming, I fold up the shirts and try to shut up," one shirt vendor says. "It's all in good fun," he repeats...