“
Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame
”
”
Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)
“
It's always the chest of the other person we lean back against for support, we only really feel supported or backed up when, as the latter verb itself indicates, there's someone behind us, someone we perhaps cannot even see and who covers our back with their chest, so close it almost brushes our back and in the end always does, and at times, that someone places a hand on our shoulder, a hand to calm us and also to hold us. That's how most married people and most couples sleep or think they sleep, the two turn to the same side when they say goodnight, so that one has his or her back to the other throughout the whole night, when he or she wakes up startled from a nightmare, or is unable to get to sleep, or is suffering from a fever or feels alone and abandoned in the darkness, they have only to turn round and see before them the face of the person protecting them, the person who will let themselves be kissed on any part of the face that is kissable (nose, eyes and mouth; chin, forehead and cheeks, the whole face) or perhaps, half-asleep, will place a hand on their shoulder to calm them, or to hold them, or even to cling to them.
”
”
Javier Marías (A Heart So White)
“
A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.
”
”
Alasdair Gray (Every Short Story, 1951-2012)
“
The psalmist says “I have set the LORD always before me.” Paul says, “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” They speak to the need for our souls to be completely and thoroughly with God. But as both of these verses suggest, it does not happen automatically. “Set” and “take captive” are active verbs, implying that you have a role in determining where your soul rests.
”
”
John Ortberg (Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You)
“
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Shakespeare: The World as Stage)
“
I stopped speaking when I realized I was no longer using any verbs or nouns, or making any sense
”
”
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
“
Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (Changing Planes)
“
There Comes the Strangest Moment
There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.
Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.
I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…
Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.
How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.
”
”
Kate Light
“
Look, it's like a handshake," he said finally. "You know when some guy goes in for the shake and you've never met him before, and he puts it out there, and you just know in that moment right before the shake if it's going to be sweaty or not? It's like that."
"So what you're saying is you can't explain it."
"I did explain it."
"No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format."
"I did explain it," Ronan insisted, so ferociously that Chainsaw flapped, certain she was in trouble.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2))
“
The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.
”
”
David Crystal (The Story of English in 100 Words)
“
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.
”
”
Paul Kalanithi
“
The voice came first, then the chill across her skin. A moment later, Noah Czerny joined her, dressed as always in his navy Aglionby sweater. Joined was perhaps the wrong verb. Manifested was better. The phrase trick of the light was even more superior. Trick of the mind was the best. Because it was rare that Blue noticed the moment Noah actually appeared. It wasn’t that he gently resolved into being. It was that somehow her brain rewrote the minute before to pretend that Noah had been slouching beside her all along.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
“
The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right.
”
”
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
“
Before we came to believe humans were
so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? Before anything happen?
No I, No we, No one. No way. No verb. No noun.
only a tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is is
All everything home.
”
”
Marie Howe
“
Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”:
I create,
You interfere,
He gets in the way.
We cooperate,
You obstruct,
They conspire.
”
”
David K. Brown (Before the Ironclad: Warship Design and Development, 1815-1860)
“
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. / For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike / down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. / For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb / before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond / your own intelligence.
”
”
Les Murray (New Selected Poems)
“
I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.
”
”
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)
“
The Stranger
Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart
of the street to the river
walking the rivers of the avenues
feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt
watching the lights turn on in the towers
walking as I’ve walked before
like a man, like a woman, in the city
my visionary anger cleansing my sight
and the detailed perceptions of mercy
flowering from that anger
if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light
and hear them talking a dead language
if they ask me my identity
what can I say but
I am the androgyne
I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
the letters of my name are written under the lids
of the newborn child
”
”
Adrienne Rich (Diving Into the Wreck)
“
Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity. Long before the modern obsession with efficiency precipitated by the Industrial Revolution and the Protestant work ethic, civilizations recognized the benefits of procrastination. In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.
”
”
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
“
Earth to Sawyer?" Campbell said. I had no idea what I'd missed.
"We were just about to discuss how incredibly debonair I look in this hat," Boone informed me, sliding his fingers along its brim. "I was born to fedora."
I wasn't sure whether the pained look on Nick's face was the result of Boone's use of the word fedora as a verb or the conversation he, Campbell, and I had been having before we'd been interrupted.
”
”
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Deadly Little Scandals (Debutantes, #2))
“
Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.
”
”
Wendy Doniger (The Hindus: An Alternative History)
“
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild—timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline—a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample—that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
In Chinese, I realized, verbs don’t change based on past or present tense. Instead you added a marker to the sentence indicating when an action occurred relative to the moment of speech, and this indication was more akin to an indication of space than of time. So instead of before and after, things happened in front of you and behind you, up the stream and down the stream.
”
”
Meng Jin (Little Gods)
“
... authentic love. It’s some kind of empathy I haven’t experienced before, more like a verb than a noun, not an act of calculated wisdom, but nurtured long-term in a shared act of becoming one soul.
”
”
Eleni Cay (The Love Virus)
“
GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried, 5
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.
“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; 10
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it, 15
And then you and I were silenter.
“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say? 20
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!
”
”
Emily Dickinson
“
I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!
”
”
Robert Patrick (Kennedy's Children)
“
Anyone who knows baseball knows Ted Williams. He played professionally from 1939 to 1960 and is one of the undisputed greatest hitters of all time, right up there with Babe Ruth. But whether you’re familiar with him or not, I have news for you: Ted Williams never played baseball. Nope, he never did. The problem there is the verb: Williams wasn’t playing. To him, hitting a baseball wasn’t a game. He always took it very, very seriously. In a 1988 interview he said as a child he literally wished on a falling star that he would become the greatest hitter to ever live. But he didn’t sit around and wait for the dream to come true. His obsessive, perfectionist work ethic would bring him more success than any descending celestial body would. Williams said, “I . . . insist that regardless of physical assets, I would never have gained a headline for hitting if I [had not] kept everlastingly at it and thought of nothing else the year round . . . I only lived for my next time at bat.” Ten thousand hours to achieve expertise? Williams probably did that a few times over. He was obsessed. After school, he’d go to a local field and practice hitting until nine P.M., only stopping because that’s when they turned the lights out. Then he’d go home and practice in the backyard until his parents made him go to bed. He’d get to school early so he could fit in more swings before classes started. He’d bring his bat to class. He picked courses that had less homework, not because he was lazy but so he’d have more time for hitting.
”
”
Eric Barker (Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
“
His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years ofhis father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters ofthe words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom ofthe wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece ofwood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end ofsuch a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.
”
”
Edward P. Jones (The Known World)
“
Before the verb “to electrocute” came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.
”
”
Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation)
“
Consider the sentence "He closed the door firmly." It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between "He closed the door" and "He slammed the door," and you’ll get no argument from me . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before "He closed the door firmly?" Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
To adapt Alice's comment on her sister's book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers? Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle of life: They gave.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
“
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison, and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live.
”
”
William Shakespeare (King Henry VI, Part 2)
“
While you're alive it's shameful to worm your way into
the Calendar of Saints.
Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.
It takes real talent not to dread being terrified
by your own agonizing lack of talent.
Disbelief in yourself is indispensable.
Indispensable to us is the loneliness
of being gripped in the vise,
so that in the darkest night the sky will enter you
and skin your temples with the stars,
so that streetcars will crash into the room,
wheels cutting across your face,
so the dangling rope, terrible and alive,
will float into the room and dance invitingly in the air.
Indispensable is any mangy ghost
in tattered, overplayed stage rags,
and if even the ghosts are capricious,
I swear, they are no more capricious than those who are alive.
Indispensable amidst babbling boredom
are the deadly fear of uttering the right words
and the fear of shaving, because across your cheekbone
graveyard grass already grows.
It is indispensable to be sleeplessly delirious,
to fail, to leap into emptiness.
Probably, only in despair is it possible
to speak all the truth to this age.
It is indispensable, after throwing out dirty drafts,
to explode yourself and crawl before ridicule,
to reassemble your shattered hands
from fingers that rolled under the dresser.
Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel
and the observation of the small mercies,
when a step toward falsely high goals
makes the trampled stars squeal out.
It's indispensable, with a misfit's hunger,
to gnaw a verb right down to the bone.
Only one who is by nature from the naked poor
is neither naked nor poor before fastidious eternity.
And if from out of the dirt,
you have become a prince,
but without principles,
unprince yourself and consider
how much less dirt there was before,
when you were in the real, pure dirt.
Our self-esteem is such baseness....
The Creator raises to the heights
only those who, even with tiny movements,
tremble with the fear of uncertainty.
Better to cut open your veins with a can opener,
to lie like a wino on a spit-spattered bench in the park,
than to come to that very comfortable belief
in your own special significance.
Blessed is the madcap artist,
who smashes his sculpture with relish-
hungry and cold-but free
from degrading belief in himself.
”
”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“
he would have liked us all to leave, so that the hotel could be shut up and he have a few days to himself before ‘rejoining’ in his new place. ‘Rejoin’ and ‘new’ were not, by the way, incompatible terms, since, for the lift-boy,‘rejoin’ was the usual form of the verb ‘to join.’ The only thing that surprised me was that he condescended to say ‘place,’ for he belonged to that modern proletariat which seeks to efface from our language every trace of the rule of domesticity.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
“
for the subject of the verb
to-hunger is never a name :
dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,
but the neotene who marches
upright and can subtract reveals a belly
like the serpent's with the same
vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy,
he must get his calories
before he can consider her profile or
his own, attack you or play chess,
and take what there is however hard to get down :
then surely those in whose creed
God is edible may call a fine
omelette a Christian deed.
”
”
W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)
“
The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back. No one knows why they are aligned in this order, but it seems to be a kind of syllogism from two other oddities. The first is that words that connote me-here-now tend to have higher and fronter vowels than verbs that connote distance from “me”: me versus you, here versus there, this versus that. The second is that words that connote me-here-now tend to come before words that connote literal or metaphorical distance from “me” (or a prototypical generic speaker):
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language)
“
What is the meaning of the phrase “shall be bound in heaven... shall be loosed in heaven?” Williams, the Bible translator, points out for us that the verb form is the perfect passive participle, so the reference is to things in a state of having been already forbidden (or permitted). This tells us that whatever is bound or loosed by the believer is done on the basis that it has already been done “in heaven,” i.e. by the Lord himself. What is it, then, that the Lord has already bound and which he has given us power to bind again? Jesus teaches us: Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. Matt. 12:29 The context of this passage finds Jesus casting out demons. His authority for thus doing is challenged by the religious authorities. They accuse him of doing it by the power of the devil himself. Jesus is explaining that he is able to control demon spirits and make them obey him because he has already bound the strong man — Satan. The fact that the demons obey Him is evidence of Satan being bound. Satan is already bound “in heaven” — by heaven’s power. His power is broken. The key is given to us. We have power over him, too. Amen! The Greek word for “bind” in the passage before us is deo. It means to fasten or tie — as with chains, as an animal tied to keep it from straying. This is glorious! When Satan is bound he is made inoperable. He loses his ability to act against us.
”
”
Frank Hammond (Pigs in the Parlor: The Practical Guide to Deliverance)
“
The very terms “split infinitive” and “split verb” are based on a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split a verb because it consists of a single word, such as amare, “to love.” But in English, the so-called infinitive to write consists of two words, not one: the subordinator to and the plain form of the verb write, which can also appear without to in constructions such as She helped him pack and You must be brave.23 Similarly, the allegedly unsplittable verb will execute is not a verb at all but two verbs, the auxiliary verb will and the main verb execute. There is not the slightest reason to interdict an adverb from the position before the main verb, and great writers in English have placed it there for centuries.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
University, organized on the Soviet system, was just like high school: daily classes from 9-2 p.m., daily written assignments; attendance strictly kept, no choice of courses beside the major. We studied Ukrainian, Russian grammar as well as literature. It sounds ridiculous, but we learned spelling in one lesson and had to read Pushkin, in the original text, next period. The same was repeated with Ukrainian spelling, grammar and also the reading of poetry by Taras Shevchenko. That was similar to learning the verbs to be or to have and read also Shakespeare. (Actually, that was how I learned English in 1938.) The subjects that were most important: History of the Party and Dialectic Materialism. That had to be learned the way they explained it and no questions should be asked; no doubts were permitted.
”
”
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
“
There’s also the human urge to make things, to paint cave walls and doodle in the margins of to-do lists. Doi once said, “I have to keep on working, otherwise nothing will be brought into existence.” But sometimes I feel like the paper is better before we get ahold of it, when it is still wood. Other times, I love the marks we leave. They feel like gifts and signs, like trail markers in the wilderness. I know we’ve left scars everywhere, and that our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English. Even though we know that none of our marks will truly last, that time is coming not just for all of us but for all we make, we can’t stop scribbling, can’t stop seeking relief wherever we can find it.
”
”
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet)
“
Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie.
”
”
Sarah Hepola (Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget)
“
What I finally came to as I walked and prayed for you is the old, old story of getting the gospel clear in your own hearts and minds, making it clear to others, and doing it with only one motive — the glory of Christ. Getting the glory of Christ before your eyes and keeping it there — is the greatest work of the Spirit that I can imagine. And there is no greater peace, especially in the times of treadmill-like activity, than doing it all for the glory of the Lord Jesus. Think much of the Savior's suffering for you on that dreadful cross, think much of your sin that provoked such suffering, and then enter by faith into the love that took away your sin and guilt, and then give your work your best. Give it your heart out of gratitude for a tender, seeking, and patient Savior. Then every event becomes a shiny glory moment to be cherished — whether you drink tea or try to get the verb forms of the new language.
”
”
C. John Miller (The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller)
“
Even the phrase we are ridiculed for, “live, laugh, love,” fits into the criteria of literal retail therapy, where we would wear it and hang it all around us to be reminded of how to feel good. When you think about how widely ridiculed that phrase is, it almost makes you forget how it represents three of the most standard and important verbs of our existence: to be alive, to enjoy oneself, to love or be loved. What people forget about the commercialization of the phrase is that it peaked between 2008 and 2012, the era when many millennials postrecession were left picking up the pieces of the world we grew up expecting to inherit imploding before our eyes. We weren’t educated enough to diagnose our own depression in a financial one, so sue us for doubling down on whimsical driftwood decor. Therapy for us at the time was painted makeshift traffic signs in our homes reminding us to experience three basic human emotions.
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Kate Kennedy (One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In)
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Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names. Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility
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Tom Wolfe (Hooking Up (Ceramic Transactions Book 104))
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descriptive grammars, that is, they set out to account for the language we use without necessarily making judgements about its correctness. However, the word ‘grammar’, as we have seen, can be used to indicate what rules exist for combining units together and whether these have been followed correctly. For example, the variety of English I speak has a rule that if you use a number greater than one with a noun, the noun has to be plural (I say ‘three cats’, not ‘three cat’). Books which set out this view of language are prescriptive grammars which aim to tell people how they should speak rather than to describe how they do speak. Prescriptive grammars contain the notion of the ‘correct’ use of language. For example, many people were taught that an English verb in the infinitive form (underlined in the example below) should not be separated from its preceding to. So the introduction to the TV series Star Trek …to boldly go where no man has gone before is criticised on the grounds that to and go should not be
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Open University (English grammar in context)
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Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you’re doing, and what you’ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed, and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one “bings” or “yahoos” anything. And it finishes your sen … All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images arrayed in a grid. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over. I confessed it, too. “I’m afraid of Google,” I said recently to an employee of the company. “I’m not afraid of Google,” he replied. “Google has a committee that meets over privacy issues before we release any product. I’m afraid of Facebook, of what Facebook can do with what Google has found. We are in a new age of cyberbullying.” I agreed with him about Facebook, but remained unreassured about Google." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole)
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Teju Cole (Known and Strange Things: Essays)
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Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory, and in connection with reading-lessons we were called on to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all this, father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the time I was eleven years of age I had about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh. I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were never heard of in those days. We carried our school-books home in a strap every night and committed to memory our next day’s lessons before we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases. I can’t conceive of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by whipping,—thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays.
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John Muir (Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth / My First Summer in the Sierra / The Mountains of California / Stickeen / Essays)
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Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial displacement of the word “emigrant” by more positively loaded words. According to David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, “before 1790, Americans thought of themselves as emigrants, not immigrants. The word immigrant was an Americanism probably invented in that year. It had entered common usage by 1820.” Related terms also emerged in the 1810s. “Pioneer in the western sense first appeared in 1817”; “Words such as mover (1810), moving wagons (1817), relocate (1814), even the verb to move in its present migratory sense, date from this period.” This was indeed a “radical transformation . . . a new language of migration.”72 But Fischer and Kelly fail to note that it was not solely American and that settler, not immigrant or pioneer, was its main manifestation. In Britain, settler was used in its current meaning at least as far back as the seventeenth century, but it was used infre- quently. By the early nineteenth century, it had connotations of a higher status than “emigrant.” Settlers were distinct from sojourners, slaves, or convict emigrants, and initially even from lower-class free emigrants. In Australia, “‘Settlers’ were men of capital and, in the 1820s, regarded as the true colonists, to be distinguished from mere laboring ‘immigrant’ . . . though eventually all Australia’s immigrants were termed ‘settlers.
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Jared Diamond (Natural Experiments of History)
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From Theoretical Elevators: Volume Two, by James Fulton. To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words. Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.
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Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist)
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Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.
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Amanda Montell (Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism)
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Maxims & Other Quotes
If you need an adjective or adverb, you're still fishing for he right noun or verb. 34
Was this a true story? It seemed somehow unimaginable, a fantasy of some kind. But he told it with such conviction that, against my own wishes, I believed him.
Was this indeed the essence of storytelling? Did one simply have to relate a tale in a believable fashion, with the authority of the imagination? 36
Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. 81
Readers become invisible even to themselves. Only the story lives. It’s the fate of the writer, yes, as well, to disappear. ~ Alastair Reid 83
‘There is only now,’ Borges exclaimed with unstoppable force. ‘Act, dear boy! Do not procrastinate! It’s the worst of sins. I’ve thought about this, you see: the progression toward evil. Murder, this is very bad, a sin. It leads to thievery. And thievery, of course, leads to drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. And Sabbath-breaking leads to incivility and at last procrastination. A slippery slope into the pit!’ 98
Borges: I no longer need to save face. This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all. 100
Borges: Believe me, you will one day read Don Quixote with a profound sense of recollection. This happens when you read a classic. It finds you where you have been. 102
Parini: I try not to think of the phallus, except when I can think of nothing else, which is most of the time.
Borges: This is the fate of young men, a limited focus. One of the few advantages of my blindness has been that I no longer focus my eyes on objects of arousal. I look inward now, though the mind has mountains, dangerous cliffs. 105
Borges: Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes. Writers feed off the corpses of those who passed before them, their precursors. On the other hand they invent their precursors. They create them in their own image, as God did with man.108
Borges: Nobody can teach you anything. That’s the first truth. We teach ourselves. 115
Borges: One should avoid strong emotion, especially when it interferes with the work at hand. We have European blood in our veins, you and I. Mine is northern blood. We’re cold people, you see. Warriors. 125
Borges: The influence of Quixote was such that Sancho acquired a taste for literary wisdom. Such wisdom in his aphorisms! ‘One can find a remedy for everything but death.’ Or this: ‘Make yourself into honey and the flies will devour you.’ 151
Borges: You see, I designed my work for the tiniest audience, ‘fit company though few.’ A writer’s imagination should not be diluted by crowds! 151
Borges: If you don’t abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. 181
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Jay Parini (Borges and Me: An Encounter)
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After President James Garfield was shot, his staff used a Mark Twain scrapbook to compile newspaper clippings documenting the incident. (In fact, Twain popularized the verb “scrap booking” itself. Before him, hobbyists said they were going “to scrap.”)
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Anonymous
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a vast majority of employers now Google your name—yes, Google has become both noun and verb—before they’ll consider hiring you. There’s your new resume, using the word resume loosely. Bye, bye, control. Statistics are hard to come by, and they tend to be all over the map. Some are from very old surveys or very limited surveys (such as 100 employers). What we know for sure is that somewhere between 35% and 70% of employers now report that they have rejected applicants on the basis of what they found through Google. Things that can get you rejected: bad grammar or gross misspelling on your Facebook or LinkedIn profile; anything indicating you lied on your resume; any badmouthing of previous employers; any signs of racism, prejudice, or screwy opinions about stuff; anything indicating alcohol or drug abuse; and any—to put it delicately—inappropriate content, etc.
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Richard Nelson Bolles (What Color Is Your Parachute? 2014: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers)
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BONUS #3 - Top 100 Common Italian Verbs To make things easier, I’ve collated the top 100 Italian verbs that you will use more than any other verbs, especially in your early development. Essere - to be Avere - to have Fare - to make, do Andare - to go Potere - to be able to Dare - to give Volere - to want Venire - to come Dovere - to have to Stare - to be, stay Dire - to say Sapere - to know (how) Vedere - to see Mangiare - to eat Parlare - to talk Uscire - to go out, exit Prendere - to take Piacere - to like Leggere - to read Amare - to love Bere - to drink Finire - to finish Capire - to understand Arrivare - to arrive Scrivere - to write Partire - to leave, depart Mettere - to put, place, set Rimanere -to remain Dormire - to sleep Vivere - to live Conoscere - to know Sentire - to feel, sense, hear Cucinare - to cook Studiare - to study Giocare - to play Chiedere - to ask, demand Trovare - to find Credere - to believe Aprire - to open Lavorare - to work Pensare - to think Correre - to run Tenere - to keep Guardare - to watch Chiamare - to call Tornare - to return Salire - to go up Preferire - to prefer Morire - to die Aspettare - to wait Comprare - to buy Nascere - to be born Cercare - to search Perdere - to lose Cantare - to sing Passare - to pass Cominciare - to start Ascoltare - to listen Riuscire - to succeed Decidere - to decide Abitare - to live Cadere - to fall Chiudere - to close Lasciare - to leave Scegliere - to choose Portare - to carry Ricevere - to receive Lavare - to wash Rispondere - to answer Sedere - to sit Vincere - to win Pagare - to pay Alzare - to raise, lift Ridere - to laugh Scendere - to go down Incontrare - to encounter Offrire - to offer Imparare - to learn Dimenticare - to forget Svegliare - to wake up Crescere - to grow Vendere - to sell Divertire - to have fun Diventare - to become Porre, mettere - to place, put Entrare - to enter Temere - to fear Pulire - to clean Vestire - to dress Seguire - to follow Restare - to stay, remain Cambiare - to change Viaggiare - to travel Spegnere - to turn off Ricordare - to remember Apparire - to appear Aiutare - to help Tacere - to be quiet Spedire - to send, ship 100. Preparare - to prepare
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Michele Frolla (Learn Italian FAST in Just 8 Hours! (How to): No Memorisation. No Homework. No Exercises! (Fluent Before You Fly))
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Through a trick lighting technique
the skyline was made and faded
with the care of a pointillist—
maybe aiding us to think nothing was
missing. We traded verbs
about what was happening
in the metropolis, realizing,
in the scorched plum of dusk,
actual human infinity was occurring
on an island before us....
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Kristen Henderson
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I was never told and I never caught on that a laboratory could teach you new facts and insights; I regarded it as just one of those chores (like irregular verbs in German and finger exercises for the piano) that the world assigns to apprentices before allowing them to become journeyman.
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R. Halmos
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The Specific Test goes like this: Somebody must do something he or she was not doing before. The ‘do’ is a good, ordinary verb that a child will understand. If you are not sure, find a child and ask him if he understands the verb. Doing the thing will have a tangible result, one that we want.
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Dave Stitt (Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time)
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Pretotyping [prē-tō-tīp-ing], verb: Testing the initial market appeal and/or actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money.
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Alberto Savoia (Pretotype It—10th Anniversary Edition: How to make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right)
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Todorki turned his attention back to the game of cat and mouse playing before them. "Why is Bakugou so angry?"
"He's not. He's happy." replied Izuku with an affectionate look in his eyes as he watched Shinsou swing up into a tree still taunting the blond with his quick tongue, and Bakugou shoot right after him yelling expletives.
"How can you tell?"
"Can't you see? He's smiling."
Todoroki squinted and sure enough, spread across Bakugou's face was the most malicious smirk he'd ever seen. Smiling was not the verb that came to mind.
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whimsical_girl_357 (The Emerald Prince)
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Before 1800 the word “light,” apart from its use as a verb and an adjective, referred just to visible light. But early that year the English astronomer William Herschel observed some warming that could only have been caused by a form of light invisible to the human eye. Already an accomplished observer, Herschel had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 and was now exploring the relation between sunlight, color, and heat. He began by placing a prism in the path of a sunbeam. Nothing new there. Sir Isaac Newton had done that back in the 1600s, leading him to name the familiar seven colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. (Yes, the colors do indeed spell Roy G. Biv.) But Herschel was inquisitive enough to wonder what the temperature of each color might be. So he placed thermometers in various regions of the rainbow and showed, as he suspected, that different colors registered different temperatures.† Well-conducted experiments require a “control”—a measurement where you expect no effect at all, and which serves as a kind of idiot-check on what you are measuring. For example, if you wonder what effect beer has on a tulip plant, then also nurture a second tulip plant, identical to the first, but give it water instead. If both plants die—if you killed them both—then you can’t blame the alcohol. That’s the value of a control sample. Herschel knew this, and laid a thermometer outside of the spectrum, adjacent to the red, expecting to read no more than room temperature throughout the experiment. But that’s not what happened. The temperature of his control thermometer rose even higher than in the red. Herschel wrote: [I] conclude, that the full red falls still short of the maximum of heat; which perhaps lies even a little beyond visible refraction. In this case, radiant heat will at least partly, if not chiefly, consist, if I may be permitted the expression, of invisible light; that is to say, of rays coming from the sun, that have such a momentum as to be unfit for vision.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
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Driveway was formed with the verb to drive in the late 1800s. This was before the automobile, and drive was something you did with a carriage or team of animals. A driveway might also be called a carriageway, horseway, or cartway. At the time, no one would have thought of its primary purpose as a place to park anything. Its purpose was to provide room for vehicles to move, not stand still. That’s what a barn or carriage house was for. It wasn’t until later, with the development of private home driveways leading from the street to a house or garage and the spread of automobiles, that it became standard to park in a driveway.
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Arika Okrent (Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language)
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A white flower Lotus opens each and every day before my mud.
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Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
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The protagonist imagines her life before her like a fig tree, the tip of every branch representing a wonderful future that beckons and winks—relationships, family, careers, travel, athletic pursuits, and many more figs that can’t quite be made out from the position she’s in. We can find ourselves wanting each and every one of these futures, and when society tells us we can have it all—through advertisements, media, or upbringing—perhaps we expect it. Yet in spite of the messaging, we sense that making a decision to pursue one life means forgoing other options. As Plath wrote, “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” The Latin root of the verb decide literally means “to cut off”—and in the metaphorical sense “to kill.” No wonder we hesitate—it can bring a sense of comfort to keep our options alive. We can make a cosy nook out of our indecision where no wrong turn can be made, where all our futures can exist safely, and we can rest our head on diaphanous pillows of possibility. But as Plath’s fig tree metaphor shows, we might find out too late that indecision isn’t all that comforting— it’s stifling and we risk never reaching for any opportunity: “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death,” wrote Plath, “just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
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Madeleine Dore (I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt)
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The noun failure came much later, in the seventeenth century. It was formed in English from the verb faillir, but the end syllable was confused with a different suffix, -ure in words like figure, pressure, and closure. Due to this confusion, faillir became failure. But before that the gerund form failing was used as the noun, in failing of teeth, failing of eyes, failing of the spirit, and also without (any) failing. For a while, there was also another noun form, faille, taken directly from French. Sans faille meant without fault, lack, or flaw, and it worked its way into medieval English along with other common set phrases like sans doute, sans délai, crier merci, en bref, au large, par cœur. We made the words more English but kept the basic structure: without a doubt, without delay, cry mercy, in brief, at large, by heart.
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Arika Okrent (Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language)
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the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward with muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. Roosevelt’s subsequent remarks about “a certain magazine” that he had just read “with great indignation” could not be reported, due to the Gridiron’s tradition of confidentiality. He spoke for nearly three quarters of an hour over a white, twelve-foot model of the Capitol, glowing with internal lights. According to one member of the audience, he “sizzled” with moral disdain. Since his listeners represented all of official Washington, and since The Cosmopolitan had just published another installment of “The Treason of the Senate,” it was not long before the Man with the Muckrake was identified as David Graham Phillips. Nor was it long before the Man became plural—denoting all writers of Phillips’s type—and the noun a verb, as in muckrakers, muckraking, to muckrake. A new buzzword was born. Ray Stannard Baker reacted to it as if stung. Opprobrium cast on all investigative journalists, he wrote Roosevelt, might discourage the honest ones, leaving the field to “outright ranters and inciters.” Roosevelt’s reply indicated a determination to give the Gridiron speech again, in some more public forum. “People so persistently misunderstand what I said that I want to have it reported in full.
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Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)
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Jesus is waiting for you to realize that the devastating pain of your story holds within its pages the perfect nouns and just the right verbs. And if you lay those nouns and verbs before Jesus, He will arrange them into a story so gloriously mind-boggling that you will be driven to give Him the whole of your story so that there is never a word that He is not in possession of.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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Paul realized that his own calling was not an afterthought but was, like Jeremiah’s, the result of a divine choice before he was born. Instead of using the verb “dedicate” or “appoint,” as in Jer 1:5, Paul uses “set apart” as he does in Rom 1:
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Albert Vanhoye (Galatians (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture))
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The verb is present tense, “I do not know a man.” The passage does not say “I have pledged never to know a man” or “I will never know a man”; and (3) Even Roman Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott recognizes that the idea of a vow of virginity, made popular by Augustine (four centuries after the time of Christ), cannot be made to fit the context. “However, the subsequent espousals can hardly be reconciled with this” is his comment.[8] Ott is correct: the idea of a “married virgin” as Keating puts it is an oxymoron. Matthew speaks of the time “before they came together,” which is what would really make no sense if there was no intention of entering into a real marital relationship. The idea of a married virgin is simply out of harmony with the Bible’s teaching concerning the nature of marriage (let alone Jewish custom of the day). As Paul taught (1 Cor. 7), there is a marital debt involved (v. 3)[9] that would preclude the idea of a married virgin: the man’s body is not his own, but is his wife’s, and vice-versa. Sexual relations are completely natural in the married state, and, in fact, are assumed if a true marriage exists. If a person wishes to be a virgin, she should remain unmarried.[10] The idea of a virgin entering into an engagement with a man, even though she intends to remain celibate, is simply an attempt to make the biblical evidence support a doctrine created long after the apostles had finished writing Scripture.
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James R. White (Mary—Another Redeemer?)
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Most commonly, noun phrases are arguments of verbs. The arguments of verbs can be described at various levels. One can classify the arguments via semantic roles. The agent of an action is the person or thing that is doing something, the patient is the person or thing that is having something done to it, and other roles like instrument and goal describe yet other classes of semantic relationships. Alternatively, one can describe the syntactic possibilities for arguments in terms of grammatical relations. All English verbs take a subject, which is the noun phrase that appears before the verb. Many verbs take an object noun phrase, which normally appears immediately after the verb. Pronouns are in the subject case when they are subjects of a verb, and in the object case when they are objects of a verb.
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Christopher Manning (Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (The MIT Press))
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I will lead blind Israel down a new path, guiding them along an unfamiliar way. I will brighten the darkness before them. —Isaiah 42:16
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Before you ask for more, thank God for what you already have. — Katie Robles
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Second, English has dispensed with the need to match nouns and verbs by gender, so you don't have to know what sex a table is before you can correctly talk about a table.
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Robert M. Knight (Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft)
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As sinners, we must be willing to associate with other sinners before we can show God’s love to them. — Jessica Talbot
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him! —Matthew 6:8
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers! —Isaiah 65:24
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Before you ask for more, thank God for what you already have. — Katie Robles —
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.
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Frederick William Hamilton (Word Study and English Grammar A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses)
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Use your dictionary to find the meaning of the new vocabulary words needed for this exercise before you begin. Write the words in your language in the space provided. Complete the following sentences using the correct form of the verb to be. 1. My aunt __________________ nice. 2. The clouds __________________ white. 3. Kathy __________________ sick. 4. The ribbons __________________ yellow. 5. We __________________ twins. 6. The windows __________________ open.
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Julie Lachance (Practice Makes Perfect Basic English)
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After I have demonstrated how ancient Egypt is connected with Mecca, let's look at the phrase 'Sema Tawy': It was not meant originally to be a reference to 'The Two Lands' because Sema as a noun means transcendence/elevation/sky, and as a verb it means to soar/rise/transcend; and Tawy as a noun is constructed from the verb which means to plummet/fall/descend and also to pleat/fold. Therefore, both words are references to the (Upper and/or Lower) Heavens and Earth/Land. However, trying to connect that which is above with that which is below should originally be observed on the Benben itself (aka, pyramidion) for that it resembled the mound that arose from the primordial waters 'Nu'; now one can appreciate with awe the repeating syllable of 'Ben' after I have proven the connection with Mecca, for that the water spring there (which saved the prophet Ishmael and his mother by God's order unto Gabriel to force its water gushing out of Earth to guarantee the survival of Noah's heir upon whom the tidings are yet to come) is called 'ZamZam'. Replacing 'Z' with 'S' takes place in non-Semitic and non pure Semitic tongues alike'; for example it even exists today in Italian when 'S' comes between vowels or before b, d, g, l, m, n, r, and v. In other words, that is a recurring theme which when applied to the word 'Sema', it shows how it is derived from 'Zam' = زم which means: 'tuck,tighten'. Therefore, not only the theme of the black cornerstone along with the Bennu bird were taken from Arabia's heritage, but even the creation story of the pyramidion is built upon that important site in Mecca which is a valley, or better said, a Tawy. Putting the capstone above it to lift it high into the sky thereby (while operating as a portal to the Upper Heavens as I have shown earlier) directly points to the fact that ancient Egypt was yearning to receive Noah's heritage for herself and it devised a whole tradition to reproduce Arabia's theme for that zeal. If 'Sema Tawy' later on came to mean 'Union of the Two Lands', then its context is now clear that: as in Mecca, so is in Egypt.
Note that the word 'ZamZam' (bring together, collect) was that action which Ishmael's mother was doing once she saw water coming out of the ground as the sources tell us, for that she was afraid that what happened before her eyes was coincidental rather than being brought up from a well beneath her.
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
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Eventually, after you have planned the whole thing, you will have many, many steps, but they will be organized into a hierarchy of sorts, as shown in Figure5-1. In this drawing, the three dots represent places where other steps go, but we chose to leave them off so that the diagram can fit on the page. This type of design is a top-down design. The idea is that you start at the uppermost step of your design (in this case, “Build flying saucer”) and continue to break the steps into more and more detailed steps until you have something manageable. For many years, this was how computer programming was taught. Although this process works, people have found a slightly better way. First, before breaking the steps (which are the verbs), you divide the thing you’re building into parts (the nouns). In this case, you kind of do that already, in the first two steps. But instead of calling them steps, you can call them objects
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Anonymous
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2The verb naturalize clearly proves what the British think of you. Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being.
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George Mikes
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Often we feel that love results from others caring or providing for us, but our deepest emotional ties usually result from our investment in others. When someone says they’ve quit loving another, I often sense that the lack of love results from failing to invest in the life of that individual. When we invest patience and kindness and dispel our anger and judgments in relationships, we then find an emotional bond springs forth. Like most business transactions, love has to be invested in before we will discover a payoff. ---Steven Thompson
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Suddenly, a man with leprosy approached him and knelt before him. “Lord,” the man said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.” Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!” And instantly the leprosy disappeared. —Matthew 8:2–3
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Like most business transactions, love has to be invested in before we will discover a payoff. — Steven Thompson —
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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Quote' is a verb; 'quotation', a noun. Lazy tongues attached to empty minds have taken the distinction from us. Before we lament, let us consider that the best languages may be the most streamlined. We certainly trend in that direction.
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D.F. Downing
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God’s love reached out to us and chose us even before we ever thought of Him. — Lloyd O’Donnell —
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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God has reminded me that it doesn’t matter what went on the day before. Whether I failed or succeeded, He is so faithful that He offers me new mercy, love, acceptance, and forgiveness when necessary, every day of my life.
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Gary Chapman (Love Is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
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One of the most intriguing proofs that are available to us nowadays about the existence of two distinct polarizing authorities in ancient Egypt between the celestial perpendicular and parallel mandates on Earth, comes from the Arabian tribes history. Although the former authority was a converging force putting the Sun's movement in the sky into the main frame of that of the stars, the latter was a diverging one cutting all links to the main frame and begetting thereby the Sun's own cult. We observe this while reading middle eastern history (before and during the birth of Islam) on the behaviour of the pagan Arabs who profiled their theological opponents as being 'sba', which means 'stars servant/worshipper/glorifier'. In ancient Egyptian language this word meant, a star; and later on in Arabic, a verb was made out of it to refer to the apostasy act that has been committed by every other Arab sect (including Muslims) that diverged away from the main pagan Arab Sun's cult of the most powerful tribe which were residing in Mecca and controlling the Kaaba, i.e., Quraish. The main clan of that tribe had carried after all the name of, Abd Shams (Slave of the Sun).
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Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
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They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.
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Anonymous
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Thus, Mary, after the Annunciation, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judaea. Elizabeth, as soon as she hears Mary arrive, “shouts out with a great shout” — the same Greek verb as the shout by which the Levites greeted the Ark of the Covenant when King David brought it into Jerusalem. And then John the Baptist, still in her womb, dances with joy, in the same way as David danced before the Ark. In other words: the missing holy objects are all coming back into the restored Temple, a process which will be complete when the Fire comes back, at Pentecost, and the wall of separation between Gentiles and Jews comes down shortly thereafter.
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James Alison (Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults)
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The phrase "son of God" marks a frame or inclusio around the entire gospel, and provides another large example of Mark's use of irony. Mark 1:1 tells us that Jesus is God's son. In the course of the gospel, demons recognize Him as the "son of God" (3:11; 5:7; cf. 1:34), but as soon as they say it, Jesus silences them. The disciples don't confess that Jesus is Son of God, not even Peter, who says only that Jesus is the "Christ" (8:29). As readers, we know from the first verse that Jesus is the "Son of God"; we see that the demons know who Jesus is. As we read along, we hope that one of the disciples will catch on. Finally, just as Jesus dies, and because of the way He dies, the person confessing Jesus as the Son is not a disciple, but a Roman centurion (15:33–39). Though no other human being confesses Jesus as the "son of God," God the Father uses this title in a few places. The first is at the beginning of the gospel in the baptism scene. Jesus is baptized and called the "beloved Son." In the same passage, Mark tells us that the heavens are "opened." The Greek word here is schizo, and the use of this word to describe the opening of the heavens at the baptism is unique to Mark. It is used regularly in the Old Testament to describe the Lord's coming by rending the heavens (Is. 64:1; Ps. 18:9). At the baptism, the Father shows that He has torn open the sky to come to deliver His people. Jesus' arrival is the sign that the heavens have been opened. Later, Mark uses the same verb for the rending of the temple veil (15:38), just before the centurion confesses Jesus. Heavens rent, and the Father identifies His Son; the temple curtain is divided, and a Gentile echoes the Father's words.
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Peter J. Leithart (The Four: A Survey of the Gospels)
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If we direct our intention toward doing (when possible) that which seems meaningful right now and noticing that any outcome is enough, we might discover a terribly obvious yet effective strategy for perpetual contentment.
Of course to do this—to open ourselves up to changing and living according to the meaning of the present month or moment—is a frightening proposition. If we do, we will surely witness our tastes and whims recycle and transform. We will watch as our personalities modify in subtle ways. And although a small number of passions might stay with us throughout our lives, many more will certainly fall away or be replaced. In other words, to admit that in this second I am not a static being is to admit that I will be something different tomorrow, something unknown a year from now, and possibly something unrecognizable to myself in a decade.
This notion is uncomfortable because it forces us to countenance the passing of time, the fading of past selves, our eventual physical death. To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to the end of our story. It’s no wonder that we bury our proverbial talons in the interests, attributes, memories, and tendencies of our past selves and insist that “who we are” has long been established.
But what might we become if we accept that, in the grammar of the universe, our nature is verb-like, transitory, ever-moving? We might become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting.
It seems natural to hold tightly onto the past. We tend to feel that if don’t have the past, we don’t have anything. Our pasts provide all of the context with which we are equipped to navigate the present. Without our memories and stories, we would indeed be directionless and alone. But it seems that we often overcompensate, desperately clinging to the “good old days”, trying to relive them in our minds, and simultaneously attempting to freeze the present moment, to capture the past before it becomes the past. This latter point can be plainly observed in our modern tendency to photograph even the most mundane of moments and to record hours of video that we’ll never revisit.
But if we spend significant amounts of time trying to immortalize and live vicariously through the past, we may relinquish a measure of ability to see the possibilities of the present and future.
We may cease to fully capitalize on the surrounding opportunities for novel experience, reflection, and appreciation. We may eschew the potential to become a marvelously different-yet-somehow-still-the-same version of ourselves.
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Jordan Bates
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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.
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Laura Vosika (The Water is Wide (The Blue Bells Trilogy Book 3))
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Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.7 See the reversal there? In the initial part of the sentence, we have “rise by sin.” The verb (rise) comes before the noun (sin). But in the next part of the sentence, Shakespeare switches the order. Now the verb (fall) comes after the noun (virtue).
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Patrick Barry (Notes on Nuance: Volume 1)
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The First Water is the Body (excerpt)
The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body.
I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.
When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.
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What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.
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When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief.
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I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.
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The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.
Energy is a moving river moving my moving body.
In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both.
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What is this third point, this place that breaks a surface, if not the deep-cut and crooked bone bed where the Colorado River runs—a one-thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty-mile thirst—into and through a body?
Berger called it the pre-verbal. Pre-verbal as in the body when the body was more than body. Before it could name itself body and be limited, bordered by the space body indicated.
Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened and bluing the stone, red and floodwater, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows.
Pre-verbal was when the body was more than a body and possible. One of its possibilities was to hold a river within it.
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If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?
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Where I come from we cleanse ourselves in the river. I mean: The water makes us strong and able to move forward into what is set before us to do with good energy.
We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water.
If your builder could place a small red bird in your chest to beat as your heart, is it so hard for you to picture the blue river hurtling inside the slow muscled curves of my long body? Is it too difficult to believe it is as sacred as a breath or a star or a sidewinder or your own mother or your beloveds?
If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?
The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the United States, we are teargassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling Natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years.
America is a land of bad math and science. The Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars.
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Natalie Díaz (Postcolonial Love Poem)
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In his final sermon before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the Second Theory of Thermodynamics and Physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
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Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
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Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven year old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with it's 8000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation (FGM), the labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl's husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.
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Ruth Barrett (Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights)
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Talk to someone else (or yourself—no one will know) about the point you want to make. • It’ll be clearer, more interesting and more urgent than anything you’d ever come up with if you sat down to “write.” ➍ Then write it down. Write down that one thing you want the reader, viewer or listener to remember if it’s all they take away. Write that before doing anything else. • Then try to shorten it to fewer than a dozen words—less is more. It should be a declarative statement or data point, not a question. Make sure it’s new or essential. Scrub the weak words and delete any soggy verbs or adjectives. ➎ Then stop.
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Jim Vandehei (Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less)
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Talk to someone else (or yourself—no one will know) about the point you want to make. • It’ll be clearer, more interesting and more urgent than anything you’d ever come up with if you sat down to “write.” ➍ Then write it down. Write down that one thing you want the reader, viewer or listener to remember if it’s all they take away. Write that before doing anything else. • Then try to shorten it to fewer than a dozen words—less is more. It should be a declarative statement or data point, not a question. Make sure it’s new or essential. Scrub the weak words and delete any soggy verbs or adjectives.
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Jim Vandehei (Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less)