Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Berkeley hills, and he doesn't get sick. And, of course, Joseph has to eat. One night I asked him where he ate if he didn't eat at the food project meal. Some of the more genteel street people prefer "scarfing" or "vulching" (an invented verb form of "vulture"), which consists of waiting inconspicuously in a restaurant until a customer finishes and then beating the busboy to the plates of leftovers. But this method doesn't work for Joseph, who looks too hungry to go by unnoticed. Instead, he spends his evening scavenging Berkeley's dumpsters for food...
...somewhat ridiculous I for one do not understand why the Council is behaving so irrationally in the face of social events. As Mr. Lyss points out, the "Social Committee's report said that financial backing...permits...precautions...and the band could all be obtained." Can is a marvelous verb. Will is a whole different ball game. It is about time the Undergraduate Council assumed an air of maturity and responsibility toward the student body. We elected the Council members, but are they representing us? Rob Silverstone...
...wholly dominated undergraduate life at these colleges-somebody must have done some studying-but they were very much on view in the parking lots around the Yale Bowl before Game time. The sun shone, and the old grads capered in a golden haze. Elderly stockbrokers wore caps printed with VERB HARVARD! or YALE VERBS! and smiled benignly as they sloshed status-label Scotch. Thirty-two-year-old lawyers who had just made partner inflated huge helium balloons, tied them to their cars with ropes hundreds of feet long, and then stood there grinning and drinking. Fifty-year-old business honchos...
This sort of thing is catching: Adler's punctuation defines, enhances and, above all, charms, in the old, musical, intransitive form of the verb. As a journalist and novelist, she has sought a coherent melody in the dissonances and sprung rhythms of her times. Her collection of essays Toward a Radical Middle (1970) presented a critical intelligence unde-flected by the push and bombast of public events. At a noisy period in the country's history, Adler firmly registered the difficulty, high cost and fragility of progress, or, as she put it, "how much has been gained...
...professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have')-a large and hairy irregular verb-raced after him on its spindly legs...