Word: verbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world goes into chaotic motion, becomes a verb and not a collection of nouns. Reality blurs. Generals and Presidents need a clear eye for the truth. But the home front and the troops in the line are sustained less by truth than by emotion (propaganda, fang baring, plumage display) and their own myth. Saddam Hussein knows this and makes a fairly gaudy display of mystique. The leaders of the coalition arrayed against Saddam have their idealism and materialism in uneasy alignment, pretty much without illusions. The trouble is that they do not always trust their own people with the truth...
...with these astonishing words: "It is no longer clear to me when I began to want to kill him." Zhang then reveals the narrator's intentions to be suicidal rather than murderous. "I" and "he" are identical, split apart only by having to survive -- for want of a better verb -- the unending political upheavals of communist China...
Though ungrammatical, the better verb could well be, as Zhang's title implies, "to die." Each period of chaos, from the antirightist movement of the '50s to the Great Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, required that the Chinese get used to living as though they were dead. Recalling tenures at labor camps, Zhang's schizophrenic main character says, "Death became second nature to him, but he lacked the strength or tenacity to die. It was at times like this that I had to help...
...Richard Clark, an Anglo English teacher. Clark, an austere-looking man with a crew cut and a deeply lined face, has been teaching at the academy for nine years. At the blackboard, several sophomores are diagraming sentences. A timid girl with glasses identifies a predicate phrase modifying a compound verb. When she's finished, Clark scans the room and says with a wry smile, "Paulette, you're the next volunteer." Paulette, a tiny girl with a large pompadour, dutifully marches to the blackboard and, in a spidery hand, diagrams a sentence with a nonrestrictive relative clause...
...slang, including at least 50 words for the act of imbibing and the condition of intoxication, not to mention about 100 more words to describe the regurgitation that follows. Even the word party, which most of us grew up thinking was a noun meaning "celebration," is now a euphemistic verb for "to drink...