Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...spun into phrases and the phrases to be spun into entries. You must separate the gold from the copper coins." By Lesson Twelve, students are being coached in such dark mysteries as the use of the "Mystic Three." Says Shepherd: "Even Julius Caesar used a Mystic Three verb cluster when he uttered his famous words: 'I came, I saw, I conquered...
...gasoline. Debris swims silently downstream to clog up on the bridges, finally carry them away. A privy goes by, "pivoting slowly like a model in a fashion parade." Fleming conveys the protracted melodrama of a bold, restless river in flood without once raising his voice adjectivally or using the verb "rampage...
...course of his rescues, Ivor Brown has found that the English have been strangely inconsistent in the words they keep and those they throw away. Why, for instance, does flay persist but not the igth Century word flay some? Why is gruesome still around but not the verb to grue (shudder)? Concludes Curioso Brown, with a February frown: despite the inventiveness of slang, the English language seems doomed to be drowned out by the tintamarre of the commonplace; all it can hope to do is to thribble along...
When I chose the title "Verdure", I knew that this was not the best, but it was the best I could find, I was searching for a verb to suggest a state of becoming rather than a static substantive. There is one word in the German language "Entfaltung" which would be a perfect word for this picture. It incorporates all of unfolding and growing...
Roughing It. Criminals originally coined cant (itself a 16th Century underworld verb meaning "to speak") to conceal their plans from eavesdroppers. When cant words pass into popular slang, as they do in the U.S. far more rapidly than Lexicographer Partridge seems to be aware, new mintings are made. Yet "the main body of cant is [more] conservative" than most people realize...