Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...There are few as puzzling as Variations in the Rotations of Azimuths. Sassow says he recently removed a set of air-raid instructions from World War II. Also included in this category is The Making of Tanganyika, which must mean the classifier eitiher took the wrong meaning of the verb or thought "Tanganyika" to be a personal noun...
...taught in the earliest stages. Mrs. Wood explains, "You learned to read across the line. You cautiously picked up each word in the spoken word order, and became very dependent upon this word order." Whereas in learning German, "You become accustomed to seeing the first half of a German verb at the beginning of a sentence and the last half some seven or eight lines later. You also know it is possible to become accustomed to this kind of material and to read fluently in the German language." She concludes that "Word order, therefore, cannot be the determining factor...
...pupil says 'teach me to read faster,' but I can't grab hold of his eyeballs and wiggle them for him. You are trying to tell the average guy about something which is highly idiosyncratic. It is here that I begin to think to teach is an intransitive verb...
...Easy as Lying. The recorder derives its name from the archaic meaning of the verb "record," that is, "to sing like a bird." Its origins have been traced to the 12th century, but its heyday came in the late 17th and early 18th century, when Bach, Purcell, Telemann, Vivaldi and Handel wrote a wealth of music for it. Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and Pepys celebrated its endearing combination of solemnity and sweetness, and King Henry VIII was an avid noodler on his collection of 77 recorders. As orchestras grew larger, however, the gentle voice of the recorder was replaced...
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...