Saturday, February 16, 2008
Notch for Orange, Notch for the Belt of Verbs
S yracuse's home win over the Hoyas earlier today inspired thoughts of a verb to add to the belt:
The Orange clowned No. 8 Georgetown, 77-70, in front of a season-high 31,327 fans at the Carrier Dome.
Clown as verb: to subject to ridicule, to cause another to appear silly, etc. Unlike evidence and discourse (as verbs), it is improbable that I will ever sneak clown or clowned into the academic prose.
Nevertheless, in celebration of the upset, go on, add it to your belt of verbs.
Postied by at Monday, August 27, 2007
Belt Belt Belt of Verbs
T oday is Start-of-Semester Day in Syracuse (even if I don't teach until tomorrow). How better to celebrate the occasion than by adding a verb to the belt of verbs (and thereby contributing to the Greater Verbiage)?
He'd discourse on the animals' diets, reproduction, life spans, their interesting and unusual characteristics. (48)
A rare sighting of discourse as verb. Tracy Kidder wrote this about Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains (a book which I will think of as Verbs Beyond Verbs from this point forward).
Friday, January 26, 2007
Belt of Verbs - Friday Leather Punch Edition
I f you're a user of the language, you'll need a verb sooner or later.
Evidently, today's Friday Leather Punch Edition is concerned with evidenced. As in,
The strong odor in the office evidenced Yoki's sick stomach.
Here
it comes: I really don't like the verb evidenced. I know it's a
legitimate word, but it always sounds wrong to me, no matter the context.
A faint hunch tells me it's a rip-off of evinced (that one, a verb of verbs!).
I doubt I would be stating it too strongly to say that this is the real dividing
line in the academy and, yes, all of humanity: those who use evidenced, and those who do not.
I checked it against the only corpus of texts I have on my trusty laptop computer--the last nineteen years of CCC articles. Thirty-one out of 414 articles put to good and proper use the verb evidenced. More than seven percent! But the distribution isn't even across the years. Just nine articles use evidenced from 1989-1999; twenty-two articles use evidenced since the turn of the century.
What does this evidence evidence? The question is too fresh to return a decisive answer. And in the mean time, I will stick with suggested, indicated, and proved as ready-to-verbalize ahead of evidenced. Make room for evidenced, if you must, in one of the deep pouches on the expanding belt of verbs.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Belt of Verbs
B uckle on your verb belt because it's time for "Belt of Verbs": a couple of kicky, kooky verbs for filling up the empty pouch.
1. From this ESPN headline: decisions
Former WBC Ortiz decisions Garcia
I'm not much for boxing (anything that reminds me of enduring punishing blows to my head, no thank you), but "decisions," the lexicon tells me, has been around for quite some time. It's what one winning boxer does to a losing boxer without a knockout. Improper usage: "I decisioned to have an A&W Root Beer with lunch." Unless you're a boxer. Then you can say "decisioned" whenever you please.
2. From a book I've been reading: multiplexed
"Two kinds of apprehension are mutliplexed together."
I guess this means something like giving off many complex and layered signals all at once: an entangled conduction that allows for (even anticipates) loss. So it's in the realm of the intelligible that comes just before noise. Not to be mistaken for the many-screened movie theater or the manufacturer of foam planes.