Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Petelka's vocabulary starts with personal pronouns: I is 1; you, 2; he, 3; she, 4. Adding X to the word-number makes a plural (man is 330, men is 330X). There are no articles, conjugations of verbs or declensions of nouns (except for the possessive case). Parts of speech are indicated by zeroes (democracy, the noun, is 8730; democratize, the verb, 87300; democratic, the adjective, 873000; democratically, the adverb, 8730000). Says Petelka...
...judge by its content, the typical British reader of the weekly Spectator is a staid, orderly man who carries an umbrella on threatening days, and whose wife has the vicar to tea in the garden. He is likely to say "verb. sap." when he means "a word to the wise," and if he says, "I rather think I shall go sailing tomorrow, D.V.," everyone knows that he means "Deo volente" (God willing...
...socialist New Statesman and Nation conducts weekly "competitions" in epigrams, limericks, etc. Recently readers were asked to play a game originated by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. On BBC's Brains Trust program (Britain's sprightly Town Meeting of the Air), he had humorously conjugated an "irregular verb" as "I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool...
...some readers may have missed the delicate subtlety of "that extended little finger." People who say "was graduated" are like those who pronounce the "i" in parliament and the "t" in often. As a matter of fact the dictionaries allow either the transitive or the intransitive use of the verb, but the stately OXFORD says of "was graduated": "now rare except...
...jargon was springing up everywhere. In San Francisco the word "boodles" was used both as a noun and a verb-and could mean anything under the sun. In Charleston, S. C., where dyeing the forelock was all the rage, kids greeted each other by crying...