Word: verbs
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...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...
Despite the absorption of foreign words, however, the Japanese language developed in a society that was hierarchical and isolated, that avoided controversy and valued subtlety. Even today the language still requires sharp differentiations-different vocabularies, different verb endings-among various levels of polite speech and familiar speech. Some believe that the language is inherently and purposely vague, while others see something more subtle. "Japanese can be made vague," says Paul Anderer, who teaches Japanese literature at Columbia University, "but the language is extraordinarily precise in determining who you are as you speak to someone else about what it is that...