Verb Conjugation Quotes

Sydney! Stop. Think of something else. Conjugate Latin verbs. Recite the periodic table.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

No proper princess would come out looking for dragons," Woraug objected. "Well I'm not a proper princess then!" Cimorene snapped. "I make cherries jubillee and I volunteer for dragons, and I conjugate Latin verbs-- or at least I would if anyone would let me. So there!

But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"-- in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.

Verb conjugation has become muddled, as well. Which is correct: “I am a neurosurgeon,” “I was a neurosurgeon,” or “I had been a neurosurgeon before and will be again”? Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So what tense am I living in now? Have I proceeded beyond the present tense and into the past perfect? The future tense seems vacant and, on others’ lips, jarring.

Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle

Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop.

Yui and Takeshi gradually realised that the Wind Phone was like a verb that conjugated differently for each person: everybody's grief looked the same at first but was, ultimately, unique.

Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat,’” in the words of William Ralph Inge.

watch your tense and case oh baby i want to be your direct object. you know, that is to say i want to be on the other side of all the verbs i know you know how to use. i've seen you conjugate: i touch you touched you heard she knows who cares i'm interested in a few decent prepositions: above, over, inside, atop, below, around and i'm sure there are more right on the tip of your tongue. i am ready to spend the present perfect splitting your infinitive there's an art to the way you dangle your participle and since we're being informal it's okay to use a few contractions, like wasn't (going to) shouldn't (have) and a conjunction: but (did it anyway) and i'm really really glad you're not into dependent clauses since all i'm really interested in is your bad, bad grammar and your exclamation point.

They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things

Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”: I create, You interfere, He gets in the way. We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.

I know we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron gate.

Kill?' I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb 'hunt?

And once, a sophomore English teacher, Mr. Watts, found out that one of his students had spent the past eight class periods carving an elaborate design into his desk. The "artwork" read: "Mr. Watts and Dickens sucks dick." Mr. Watts confronted the carver, telling him, "That's wrong!" Then Mr. Watts took the knife and crossed out the last s in sucks. "This sentence has two objects," he explained. "You need to conjugate the verb differently." And he handed the knife back.

I do not intend to give you any homework - no difficult math questions, or anything like that, and conjugating English verbs is outside my sphere of interest. However, from time to time I'll give you a short assignment.

She makes several references to Paul making her "burn," almost like she's conjugating verbs. I burn for him. He burns for me. We burn for each other. One cannot help but suspect VD as a factor in their engagement. This comes up again when King defines a "hapahali" as "two people jumping around in the same skin," an image which, like the burning, is disgusting.

I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Anne, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down on a man that hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is.

Events, or acts of understanding, are the actions of a subject expressed as a verb, the reality of which derives from the person who conjugates it.3 For

What happened when the Verb asked the noun to conjugate? She said "no-no!", forgot the "o" and decided to become a nun!

He's instructed the boys to conjugate the verb 'incarcerate': the repeated hard c sound seems to scrape at the walls of the room, as if the very words themselves are seeking escape.

They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?

Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the “language of nature”: mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word.

Detention does not sound appealing. I do my homework - choose five verbs and conjugate them. To translate: traducir. I traducate. To flunk: fracasar. Yo am almost fracasaring. To hide: esconder. To escape: escapar To forget: olvidar.

Lorsque, bien plus tard, au lycée, M. Laplane nous enseigna que la chouette était l'oiseau de Minerve, et qu'elle représentait la sagesse, je fis un si grand éclat de rire qu'il me fallut copier, jusqu'au gérondif, quatre verbes qui, de plus, étaient déponents.

Caitlyn, s’il vous plait!” Madame said, whacking the blackboard with her stick, its end pointing to the irregular verb devoir, “to have to.” She wanted Caitlyn to conjugate it. Caitlyn felt the class’s attention turn to her, and a clammy sweat broke out in her armpits. Her brain stopped in its tracks, unable to move under the pressure. A vague sense of having known how to speak French in her dreams tickled at her brain, but the skill was as lost to her in the waking world as was Raphael. “Devoir,” Caitlyn croaked. “Er. Je dev? Tu dev?” Madame gaped at her, horrified. Caitlyn shook her head; she knew those words were wrong. “Er … I mean, uh …” And then out of nowhere came, “Egli deve, lei dovrebbe …” These words felt right. He must, she must … Several girls burst into laughter. “What?” Caitlyn demanded. “You’re speaking Italian!” one girl shrieked, and collapsed into hysterical giggles.

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear. But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold onto anything that’s her.

When I found my comprehension somewhat improved by this habit, I determined, as if I already knew how to talk even then, to take advantage of this exercise whenever I could—but not as some ignoramuses do. There are those who interlard their conversations from time to time with some brief, pithy Latin phrase, giving strangers to understand that they’re great Latinists when they hardly know how to decline a noun or conjugate a verb.

Twenty minutes into French class, Madame O’Malley was conjugating the verb to believe in the subjunctive. Que je croie. Que tu croies. Qu’il ou qu’elle croie. She said it over and over, like it wasn’t a verb so much as a Buddhist mantra. Que je croie; que tu croies; qu’il ou qu’elle croie. What a funny thing to say over and over again: I would believe; you would believe; he or she would believe. Believe what? I thought, and right then, the rain came.

When I at last dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate, Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then, potentially: I may not and cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.

I found it again at last! Page 156 - 157 of *My Soul to Keep* by Melanie Wells. Dr. Dylan Foster is thinking to herself while searching through literature on snake lore, "Then there was all the mystical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busing in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew--in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew--all notable skills--but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory." "When it was all said and done, I'd spent four years and trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me.

Moment, momentum, momentous If you reduce sports to its smallest discrete units, its subatomic particles, you're left with protons and electrons and neutrons called moments. They're the building blocks of every season, every game, every series of downs. Two or more moments may accrete into something more, a propulsive energy called momentum, which in turn can snowball into something greater still, that which is momentous. Consider those consecutive moments last Aug. 4 (2012 summer Olympics) in London, when Michael Phelps-in his final Olympic race-caught and then overtook Japan's Takeshi Matsuda on the butterfly leg of the men's 4 x 100 medley relay. Momentum passed to Phelps's U.S. teammate Nathan Adrian, who pulled away on the freestyle leg, sealing a victory that yielded Phelps's 18th gold medal, and 22nd medal overall, more than any other Olympian in history. It was like the conjugation of some Latin verb: moment, momentum, momentous. Or if you prefer: Veni, vidi, vici (we came, we saw, we conquered). From "moments of the year

To conjugate (or modify the form of the verb) you follow two simple steps: 1) remove the –en from the verb and 2) replace it with the appropriate ending.

Essential 55 verb list Beginning students should pay careful attention to the 55 verbs in this list. We have chosen them because they are useful for learning essential conjugations, tricky spelling changes, and common usage. We have also highlighted certain pairs of verbs to help you understand the difference between a reflexive and a nonreflexive verb. If you study the verbs on this list, you will be able to conjugate just about any verb you come across and you will be able to express yourself in correct idiomatic Spanish.   acabar ir/irse (Verb Pair) andar   aprender leer caer/caerse (Verb Pair) llamar/llamarse (Verb Pair) cantar llevar comenzar mirar/mirarse (Verb Pair) comer   comprar oír conducir pagar conocer pensar construir perder contar poder creer poner/ponerse (Verb Pair) dar   deber quedarse decir querer dormir saber entrar salir escribir sentir/sentirse (Verb Pair) estar   estudiar ser gustar (See Defective and Impersonal Verbs) tener   tomar   traer   venir haber ver hablar vivir hacer volver

Learning a language is a nonlinear affair. A moment of triumph often follows a crisis of confidence. Or else, after days of utter mastery, as your brain processes the language without that laborious sensation of actually processing it, you might find yourself suddenly suffering from language panic, total verb collapse, making errors of conjugation like someone blindfolded striking at tennis balls. You reach for a preposition from the shelf in your mind and find nothing there, absolutely nothing, no language whatsoever.

The Americans have been obliged to invent a new verb for which we have no use over here—‘to enthuse.’ Why don’t we enthuse? And why, if we do conjugate this verb in secret, are we so afraid to let it be known? . . . We fear terribly to encourage ourselves or others. The people over there are not afraid. They let themselves go individually and independently over what they like or admire, and pour forth torrents of generous praise which we should shrink from voicing unless we were quite sure that everybody else agreed with us, or unless the object of our admiration had been a long time dead.” The English may detect a note of condescension here, but an American won’t.

I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world.

Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.

It is the verb to be. I am, you are, she is...Can you think of anything more important than those words? Choose to conjugate your life with positivity.

At first it was awkward and embarrassing; he didn’t know how to conjugate verbs, so he just used the present tense and wildly waved his arms behind him to indicate that something had already happened.

But do you know what the most important verb in the English language is? It is the verb to be. I am, you are, she is...Can you think of anything more important than those words? I am Ida. You are Ailis. She is Nettie. This is Quinn. There is great power in those words. How else can we use the to be verb? Let's try I am happy, you are strong, she is going to be found. Now you try. You show me how you understand the power of that verb. Isn't it interesting how a single verb can change your vision? Choose to conjugate your life with positivity" -Ida

Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.

In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn’t embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name.

After the death of her husband and her eldest son, my great-grandmother gathered her surviving children around and asked them what they wished to become. A single word laden with longing and hope. And because the verbs are left un-conjugated in Burmese, left untouched, the same word describes the past, present, and future.

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb. She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil

Verb conjugation in the future simple Here is a look at the verb conjugation for the same types of verbs in the future. Verb: Correr (to run) • Yo correré en la escuela todos los días. (I will run at school every day.) • Tú correrás en la calle por las mañanas. (You will run on the street every morning.) • Él correrá cada fin de semana. (He will run every weekend.) • Ella correrá con sus perros. (She will run with her dogs.) • Nosotros correremos con nuestros amigos. (We will run with our friends.) • Vosotros correréis para hacer ejercicio. (You will run to do exercise.) • Ellos correrán en el campo. (They will run on the field.) • Ellas correrán todo el tiempo. (They will run all the time.)

Evelyn Underhill says it this way: We mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual—even the religious—plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, not having and not doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.

When I got bored, I conjugated verbs. Kissing and conjugating go well together. They’re both French. No.

Nak stepped him through the Narashtovik alphabet, which was nearly identical to Mallish but lacking three letters, and the subtleties of its pronunciation, which unlike the Mallish stew was regular and orderly as the board of a game of cotters, and which Nak claimed was close enough to Gaskan to sound like no more than a regional accent. He made Dante write it out five times, then speak each letter five more. He drilled Dante on the verb conjugations of Narashtovik and its relation to modern Gaskan. He showed him the structure of its grammar in simple sentences, taught him a handful of words, the precise laws of how a verb cycled through the tenses of the present, the past, the future, the subjunctive. He bade Dante write out a dozen verbs through each of their forms and left on some monkish errand. Busywork, Dante thought, and far too much to take in at once. That Nak wanted him to learn through rote memorization struck him as an insult.

Primary Science confused her (if man descended form monkeys, how com the monkey that loved with Mama Boy near the church, and has lived with her for so long as anyone remembered, has not evolved and become human?) and grammar baffled her even more (she could never grasp why it was 'Run Run Ran' but 'See Saw Seen'). When she was caned by her teacher for failing to conjugate the verb Fear (she had said 'Fear Fore Forn'), she decided that school was not for her. There was no logic in what she read, all the teaching seemed designed both to compound her problems and to confound her. When she asked questions, her teachers told her off for being disruptive. How could it be 'Tear Tore Torn'? Change the first letter and the rules changed completely! How was she supposed to remember all of that? 'See Saw Sawn'. It was an unrealistic demand. And on top of that there was the illogicality of mathematics to deal with. Finding solutions to abstract questions that had nothing to do with real life. She did not see how any of this would help her, how it would help anybody really.

Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: “To lay is to get laid and laid.” (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Monica police officer might read into it.) “To lie,” then, works as follows. “Today I lie on the beach.” “Yesterday I lay on the beach.” “At times, I have lain on the beach.” None of those acts puts me in any danger of being arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior. But that’s only because I conjugated the verb correctly. I

a Navajo verb is conjugated not solely according to its subject, but also according to its object. The verb ending depends on which category the object belongs to: long (e.g., pipe, pencil), slender and flexible (e.g., snake, thong), granular (e.g., sugar, salt), bundled (e.g., hay), viscous (e.g., mud, feces) and many others. The verb will also incorporate adverbs, and will reflect whether or not the speaker has experienced what he or she is talking about, or whether it is hearsay. Consequently, a single verb can be equivalent to a whole sentence, making it virtually impossible for foreigners to disentangle its meaning.

over.  Erceldoune.  The Eildon Hills where Thomas the Rhymer disappeared, a wee bit south of Melrose.” “Yeah, I know where it is.”  Shawn planted his foot in the stirrup and swung up onto the garron.  His travels with Douglas had taught him a great deal.  “So your next brilliant idea is a fairy hill?” Niall grinned.  “’Tis one way of getting rid of you before you conjugate a verb poorly and make me look like a fool before the Bruce.” Shawn laughed.  “Too bad for you I’ll be talking to Bruce before you can push me down a fairy hole.

which is to say, as a transaction between species in nature, eaters and eaten. (“The whole of nature,” wrote the English author William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive

Those are called inflection glyphs, and they mark the conjugation of verbs and declension of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. In formal writing, they’re usually colored to make them easier to see—and also for aesthetics—but in calligraphy, they’re often omitted for a more elegant outline. Also, by changing the height or angle of the logograms, a writer can indicate tone, emphasis, and—but we’re now probably getting too advanced. You’ll pick these up in time.

I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them.

wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them.

Here is his secret set down in his own words—words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung in every home and school, every shop and office in the land— words that children ought to memorise instead of wasting their time memorising the conjugation of Latin verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil—words that will all but transform your life and mine if we will only live them: ‘I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,’ said Schwab, ‘the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. ‘There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticise anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.

Here.” She gestured with the cloth. “If you’ll just drop your towel, I can clean you up.” “Look at you,” Jeremy said in awe. “With your full sentences and your conjugated verbs. I am in awe of your cognitive capacity.

You’re sure you’re okay?” Luka looked wary as we walked to the Trg, like the sight of the city might set me off crying. We spoke Cringlish, a system we’d devised without discussion—Croatian sentence structure injected with English stand-ins for the vocabulary I was lacking, then conjugated with Croatian verb endings. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just having culture shock.” “You can’t get culture shock from your own culture.” “You can.

I’m in the middle of a sentence when he grunts in displeasure, but I force myself to set my book down and turn to him. Dzyer gives me a nod and asks if Lambians really prohibit royal women from touching forged steel for fear of them contaminating themselves? I explain that they don’t really speak of it, then recall that I got a few weird looks for carrying a weapon. Of course, early on I also got looks for wearing what Lambians consider ‘masculine’ clothing and forgetting that in their language verbs are conjugated differently depending the sex of the speaker and the person referred to. Efficient, one would think, to know something about who is performing an action but confusing because the action itself does not change.

Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be conjugated, and 70 percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered. Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.” Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles. The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition. In a few chapters we'll discuss the likely evolutionary reasons, but for now we'll simply note that deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate. Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated. If you moved to China, your myelin would wrap fibers that help you conjugate Mandarin verbs. To put it another way, myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do. Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

Their lack of interest is part of their lack of worry over the future, which is a natural thing—and in 1917 a good thing, too. For then at Brookfield there were boys who were to die within a year; and they were quite happy, playing rugger and conjugating verbs and reading the War news, only half aware that the last concerned them any more than the second, or as much as the first.