Monday May 21, 2012
Mark Twain's thoughts about the Italian verb could also be applied to the homegrown variety:
Examination and inquiry showed me that the adjectives and such things were frank and fair-minded and straightforward, and did not shuffle; it was the Verb that mixed the hands, it was the Verb that lacked stability, it was the Verb that had no permanent opinion about anything, it was the Verb that was always dodging the issue and putting out the light and making all the trouble.
("Italian With Grammar." Harper's, August 1904)
Fair enough. Unlike other
word classes, the English verb is a shape-shifting time traveler (see
tense) that often relies on a trained team of helpers (see
auxiliaries). It can be a troublemaker, all right.
But it can't be ignored. In the world of grammar, the verb is the head honcho, the big kahuna, in short (as its Latin root verbum suggests), The Word. As Michael Maittaire observed in The English Grammar (1712), "It is the only Word which gives motion and life to all the rest; without which there can be no sentences, and all other words are but like a rope of sand, without any sense at all."
Still, while it may be the grammatical top dog, the verb appears last in our alphabetical list of the Top 24 Grammatical Terms That We Should Have Learned in School. So if you're in the mood to brush up on your grammar, you might want to start at the end of the list and work your way back.
With a little practice, you may, like Mark Twain, "catch a Verb and tame it, . . . spot its eccentricities, . . . penetrate its disguises," and, in so doing, "learn its game and play the limit."
More About English Verbs:
Image: Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
Friday May 18, 2012
Today's guest post is by Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), recipient of two National Book Awards and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The main rule of a writer is never to pity your manuscript. If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again. A lot of writers have failed because they have too much pity. They have already worked so much, they cannot just throw it away. But I say that the wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. My wastepaper basket is on a steady diet.
(Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted by Donald Murray in Shoptalk: Learning to Write With Writers. Boynton/Cook, 1990)
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Image: Getty Images
Wednesday May 16, 2012
In a "Beautiful Words" contest held in 1911 by the Public Speaking Club of America, several submissions were deemed "insufficiently beautiful," among them grace, justice, and truth.
In the judgment of Grenville Kleiser, then a popular author of books on oratory, "The harshness of the g in grace and the j in justice disqualified them, and truth was turned down because of its metallic sound" (Journal of Education, Feb. 1911). Among the qualified beauties were melody, virtue, harmony, and hope.
Over the years there have been countless playful surveys of the most beautiful-sounding words in English. Perennial favorites include lullaby, gossamer, murmuring, luminous, Aurora Borealis, and velvet. But not all recommendations have been so predictable--or so obviously euphonious.
- When the New York Herald Tribune asked poet Dorothy Parker for her list of beautiful words, she replied, "To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn't it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are check and enclosed."
- James Joyce, author of Ulysses, chose cuspidor as the single most beautiful word in English.
- In the second volume of the Book of Lists, philologist Willard R. Espy identified gonorrhea as one of the ten most beautiful words.
- Poet Carl Sandburg chose Monongahela.
- Another poet, Rosanne Coggeshall, selected sycamore.
- Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-American essayist and lexicographer, dismissed the "clichés" on a British Council survey of beautiful words (which included mother, passion, and smile) and instead nominated moon, wolverine, anaphora, and precocious.
- Novelist Henry James said that for him the most beautiful words in English were summer afternoon.
- When British essayist Max Beerbohm found out that gondola had been chosen as one of the most beautiful words, he replied that scrofula sounded the same to him.
Of course, like other beauty contests, these verbal competitions are shallow and absurd. Yet consciously or not, don't most of us favor certain words for their sound as well as their sense?
In her book Poet's Pen, Betty Bonham Lies turned the beautiful-words list into a composition assignment for student writers:
Assignment: Bring in to class two lists of words: the ten most beautiful words in the English language and the ten ugliest--by sound only. Try to blot out what the words mean, and listen only to how they sound.
In class: Have the students write their words on two blackboards or sheets of newsprint: the beautiful words on one, the ugly on the other. Put in some of your own favorites of both kinds. Then talk about what elements in the words seem to make them either attractive or unattractive. Why is pandemonium so euphonious when its meaning is "a wild uproar"? Why does crepuscular sound unpleasant when twilight is lovely? Discuss disagreement among students; one's beautiful word might be another's ugly. . . .
Ask students to write a poem or a prose paragraph using at least five of the beautiful or ugly words. Tell them not to think about form. They might write a narrative, a vignette, a description, a list of metaphors or similes, or total nonsense. Then have them share what they have written.
(The Poet's Pen: Writing Poetry With Middle and High School Students. Libraries Unlimited, 1993)
Now if you're in a sharing mood, click on "comments" to pass along your nominations for the most beautiful words in English.
More About Words:
Monday May 14, 2012
You may already own an e-book reader, such as Amazon's Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook. If not, you probably have friends who insist on singing the praises of this popular device. They may even call it "indispensable." After all, that's how Edward Bellamy described his version of the magic reading machine--in a short story published in 1889.
After I had given my order, the waiter brought a curious-looking oblong case, with an ear-trumpet attached, and, placing it before me, went away. I foresaw that I should have to ask a good many questions before I got through, and, if I did not mean to be a bore, I had best ask as few as necessary. I determined to find out what this trap was without assistance. The words "Daily Morning Herald" sufficiently indicated that it was a newspaper. I suspected that a certain big knob, if pushed, would set it going. But, for all I knew, it might start in the middle of the advertisements. I looked closer. There were a number of printed slips upon the face of the machine, arranged about a circle like the numbers on a dial. They were evidently the headings of news articles. In the middle of the circle was a little pointer, like the hand of a clock, moving on a pivot. I pushed this pointer around to a certain caption, and then, with the air of being perfectly familiar with the machine, I put the pronged trumpet to my ears and pressed the big knob. Precisely! It worked like a charm; so much like a charm, indeed, that I should certainly have allowed my breakfast to cool had I been obliged to choose between that and my newspaper. The inventor of the apparatus had, however, provided against so painful a dilemma by a simple attachment to the trumpet, which held it securely in position upon the shoulders behind the head, while the hands were left free for knife and fork. Having slyly noted the manner in which my neighbors had effected the adjustments, I imitated their example with a careless air, and presently, like them, was absorbing physical and mental aliment simultaneously.
While I was thus delightfully engaged, I was not less delightfully interrupted by Hamage, who, having arrived at the hotel, and learned that I was in the breakfast-room, came in and sat down beside me. After telling him how much I admired the new sort of newspapers, I offered one criticism, which was that there seemed to be no way by which one could skip dull paragraphs or uninteresting details.
"The invention would, indeed, be very far from a success," he said, "if there were no such provision, but there is."
He made me put on the trumpet again, and, having set the machine going, told me to press on a certain knob, at first gently, afterward as hard as I pleased. I did so, and found that the effect of the "skipper," as he called the knob, was to quicken the utterance of the phonograph in proportion to the pressure to at least tenfold the usual rate of speed, while at any moment, if a word of interest caught the ear, the ordinary rate of delivery was resumed, and by another adjustment the machine could be made to go back and repeat as much as desired.
(Edward Bellamy, "With the Eyes Shut." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1889)
To read all of Bellamy's prophetic short story (as an e-text, of course), visit With the Eyes Shut at Project Gutenberg of Australia.
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Image: The Amazon Kindle 2
