Five items or less?

Ah the perils of the nitpicking editor and the careless writer whose fingers trip across the keyboard faster than his brain can correct.
Kudos to Stephen Fry’s Kinetic Typography - Language video.

When did a pronoun become a noun?

Super Bowl weekend wasn’t about football for me. It was about getting away from the laptop, the plots and characters in my head, and the chilly high desert weather.

Southern California beckoned.

I answered.

I won’t go into the details of the trip except where it concerns the writer side of me … and that side was totally confused.

I was staying with friends, a lovely couple raising three grandchildren. Grandma volunteers at the elementary school once a week. On an uncharacteristically rainy day, she sat with the teacher to discuss an in-class assignment.

Students had been given a paragraph and asked to find ten nouns. Grandma read the paragraph but could find a mere seven … and she’s well-versed in the English language. So she asked the teacher what she was missing.

To her surprise, the teacher pointed to two words – we and I.

“Those are pronouns!” she exclaimed.

The reply? “Yes, but we teach them as nouns.”

A heated discussion produced no results. As far as the teacher was concerned, we and I are nouns!


With no little frustration, Grandma relinquished that part of the argument and asked about the tenth noun.

“Bike,” the teacher pointed out in a sentence that read, “We bike to the park.”

“But in this sentence bike is a verb.”

“Yes,” came the explanation, “but the children recognize bike as a noun.”

This is an accurate account of the event that makes me wonder … a lot.

Would you use these verbs?

When I blogged about my favorite verbs recently, I was thinking in terms of creating action within fiction. A couple of friends joked about the piece and offered a few of their own favorites, none of which I plan to use in my own work. But, the topic, and the laughs, made me think about other types of verbs, common and not so common, some of which I've listed below. I can’t foresee using them – at least not at this moment – but who knows. Maybe, just maybe, one or two of them will slink around the crevices of my brain and worm their way into my prose.

Verbs like:

• Backspace: I’m not sure this is really a verb but I caught myself saying I was going to backspace somebody out of my life. Don’t you think it’s a stronger word than delete?
• Abscind: Can you imagine writing this: The killer abscinded his victim’s hands. Nah, it doesn’t even sound like a verb.
• Scamander: I think I’d just use meander. Scarify: This really means to scar but I think readers might interpret it as a form of scare.
  
• Plodge: I kind of like this one. I can almost see someone plodging around an unclean stable or maybe the soggy ground during a monsoon.
• Fantasticate: Sorry, but this one sounds a bit too much like one of those malaprops, like refudiate.
• Obfuscate: This is actually a common word, one I used in a column many, many years ago. A reader told me if I didn’t stop using such big words, he would stop reading my stuff. (I backspaced him from my Christmas list, even before I ever thought of using backspace as a verb.)
• Gerrymander: We’ve probably seen a version of this word as a noun but not so much as a verb. It’s kind of sad, though, that a word that sounds so nice would mean something so nefarious. (Okay, maybe nefarious is too strong but isn’t it a melodic word, despite its definition?)
• Decatise: Hmmm. I bet ephemera experts know how to decatise.

This whole verb thing interests me. It’s the verb that moves action along and the precise verb should be powerful enough to let the reader feel and see the action.