Word: verbs
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Intent on refuting potential criticism of Olde English snobbery, the editors seem to have gone out of their way to find Americanisms. "Hoity-toity," "WATS line," "umpteen," "pinhead," and the verb to "off" (kill) are all defined; the editors do, however, miss a couple, such as "dive," as in a bad or dangerous restaurant or bar, and "hyper." Occasional usage notes do slip into an unpleasant pedantic style: "Careful writers use dived rather than dove in the past tense." But even less frequent notes on the origin or phrases turn up interesting information; the term "poobah," for example, a person...
Russell Baker seems to have taken a wild swing at Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum when he came up with Televiso, ergo sum -"I am televised, therefore I am." Since "I am televised" is in the passive voice, his Latin verb, derived from video, videre, demands the same form. The correct version of his attractive thought would therefore be Televideor, ergo...
...Anglo the Spanish language seems to be everywhere, far more prevalent thatn English. Everyone complains about receiving wrong-number telephone calls from "Latins" (a favorite euphemism for Cubans). In fact, one of the less obnoxious ethnic slurs for a Cuban is "oye," the command form of the Spanish verb to hear and the word with which the Cubans start their phone conversations. When Anglo friends greet each other with "oye" it is a half--but only half--joking way of saying, "My God there are so many fucking Cubans in this city they're going to drive...
...there is no squirming to catch the teacher's attention. Alexei Grigoryevich points to a girl in the third row, who rises to explain that all these words are of foreign origin. The teacher draws back a curtain covering part of the blackboard, disclosing a chart of verbs. Asked to explain where the accent falls in various verb forms, students respond by reciting grammatical rules. Invariably, they answer in complete sentences. Each pupil is graded on his performance in a daybook, a running report that is sent home to be initialed by his parents at the end of every...
...poems are a roadmap of Seamus Heaney's soul. In them he has left Belfast and the political images of past volumes and retreated to the fields. He's headed to the coast, "through flowers and limestone" to eat the day "deliberately, that its tang/Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb." And an active, transitive verb at that. Heaney always places himself in each animated poem: in a record of his four sequestered years in the country, he wanders from the water's edge to open shed, from a stone pier to a deeply tilled...