Word: verbs
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This town, Gilbert feels, is what keeps him from doing better. Home for the Grapes is Endora, obviously christened by screenwriter Peter Hedges after the verb "to endure." Run-down and depressed, Endora suffers from and delights in the great wheel of American capitalism. What keeps Gilbert planted in this morbid spot is Momma (Darlene Cates). Most of the time Momma sits planted on a sofa in front of the TV, where she sleeps at night, and where the girls dutifully pull up a table at meal times. Meanwhile, the house, which Mr. Grape built and died in, has rotted...
This is not always easy to do. In his moments of lucidity, Bennett's king embodies the "Farmer George" image. Plainspoken, fair and with a sense of humor (he calls the Queen "Mrs. King"), George III is nonetheless indisputably in charge. "I am the verb, sir, not the object," he tells a subject. But following the descent into madness, Hawthorne must spew the random gibberings of a man who has lost all control...
...stuffed to the gills with artists, writers, journalists, psychiatrists and academics so set in their reverse-chic ways that no newcomer could hope to adapt. These are people who congratulate themselves for not choosing to vacation among the canape-consuming classes in the Hamptons but use summer as a verb. Hunting, fishing or networking without a license is punishable by a $300 fine and deportation to the mainland...
...Klingon dialogue for Star Trek III. He took his job more seriously than anyone expected, creating a substantial vocabulary and some kinky and sophisticated grammatical rules that are linguistically solid, albeit "kind of unnatural from a human point of view." (Klingon sentences, for instance, follow a bizarre object-verb-subject syntax.) In 1985 Okrand published the vocabulary and rules in The Klingon Dictionary, which now has 250,000 copies in print and is still going strong. Last fall he came out with an audiotape, Conversational Klingon (50,000 copies). On it, Okrand and Michael Dorn, who plays Klingon Lieutenant Worf...
Thanks to that little button on the ever present remote control, the one that cuts off television sound during commercials, a comforting -- even empowering -- new verb has sprouted throughout the land: to mute. Typical usage, describing how you cut off a boring conversation: "I muted...