Quotes About Verbs

The successful M & M presentation inevitably involves a certain elision of detail and a lot of passive verbs.

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs

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.

Strunk and White don't speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I'm willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.

With verbs randomly scattered about instead of neatly stacked at the end of each sentence, verbs that had no real endings, and nondeclension nouns, the language was oral chaos.

When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That

Because verbs have the power to dictate how a sentence conveys who did what to whom, one cannot sort out the roles in a sentence without looking up the verb. That is why your grammar teacher got it wrong when she told you that the subject of the sentence is the "doer of the action." The subject of the sentence is often the doer, but only when the verb says so;

In traditional grammars the two phrases are called the indirect and direct objects; linguists today usually call them simply the "first object" and the "second object." The term dative, by the way, has nothing to do with dates; it comes from the Latin word for "give.

Fourth—and here's where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake. *Goldie drove the lake her minibus.

And fifth, the promiscuous verbs and monogamous verbs seem to convey the same kinds of meanings.

If I use the verb pour, my field of vision narrows to how the water is caused to move, ignoring its destination; that's the reason we can say pour the water but not pour the glass. But if I use the verb fill, my field of vision narrows to the resulting fullness of the glass, ignoring the trajectory of the water; that's why we say fill the glass but not fill the water.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.

Like the hostages, I can't find any excuses for my jailers, even if some of them are rootless exiles. They change continuously as if there's a factory producing new versions all the time. They're like nouns and verbs ungoverned by rules, indeclinable, or arithmetical problems where numbers and logic interweave and every time the teacher and the student think of solving them together their brain cells

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...

Chaque fois je vais sentir moins et souvenant plus, mais quelle est la mémoire, mais le langage des sentiments, un dictionnaire des visages et des jours et des parfums qui reviennent comme des verbes et des adjectifs dans la parole." Marelle

se pueden inventar verbos? quiero decirte uno: yo te cielo, así mis alas se extienden enormes para amarte sin medida... somos de las misma materia, de las mismas ondas...

Can verbs be made up? I'll tell you one. I heaven you, so my wings will open wide to love you boundlessly.

Se pueden inventar verbos? Quiero decirte uno: Yo te cielo, así mis alas se extienden enormes para amarte sin medida

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

If you want your style to be energetic and lively, take the most direct route and use the most energetic and lively part of speech in the English language: verbs.

categories are more difficult to learn than others. Nouns seem to be the easiest; adverbs—the most difficult; verbs and adjectives—somewhere in between" (p. 298).

Las personas son nombres, las acciones son verbos. Peras y olmos.

I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.