Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Note that verb: sucked. It describes nearly every aspect of the project. The song, The video, The event, Even if Jones did post a sign declaring "Check your egos," this whole affair is little more than a concerted media suck-up to glitterati public images, and of one singer's ceiling mirror image in particular...
There are two kinds of people: those who divide things into two categories and those who do not. Vladimir Nabokov is the first kind. In one of his earliest U.S. lectures, the Russian emigre told his classes at Stanford University that there were, essentially, "verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization...
...from the U.S.S.R., four dramas make their first appearance in English, translated by the author's son Dmitri. All are adjectival, although an occasional verb wriggles by to enliven the proceedings. All glisten with the celebrated Nabokovian cunning; all are souvenirs of the post-revolutionary epoch when, in some violent reversal of fairy-tale tradition, Russian aristocrats popped up in Europe as commoners, driving taxis, hiring on as movie extras and waiting on tables...
WHILE INDIVIDUAL pieces seem to carry a (not-always-subtle) message--such as the pseudo-notice calling for "woman" to be a verb, and crying "don't let men man our language!" --Jacklin and Stillman deny that there is any overriding political zeitgeist to their work...
...just assume it was your task. Well, first you would change the thees, the thous, the thys and the thines. Instead of "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?"-one of the Bard's most famous questions-you would have Juliet ask, "Wherefore art you Romeo?" The archaic verb must go as well, of course, and what you wind up with is an up-to-date "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore are you Romeo...