My argument would not be to create new verbs, but to be more open minded about using nouns as verbs. but I don't want to jump that thread here). We suck energy out of the word (the only way to put it back in is to then create a value statement about the word/subject. Reversing this process pulls us back from the primary experience into a more reserved/language/observational state. Transferring a word from noun to verb energizes it and sets it closer to the heat of a kinetic exchange. "I haymaker you," but we will more than likely meet resistance from readers and critics. We could force it to act as a verb through syntax. This is a big muscle movement with tons of power and commitment behind it. When faced with such a limited number of ways of defining a mode of attack, I realized that we frequently turn an action (with a high degree of physical specificity) into a noun.Ĭonsider a word like haymaker. I recently went on an interview where I was asked to describe various scenes from an action movie to create a script that would be read between dialogues for the visually impaired. (We are what we do, not what we appear to be.) Not to be tedious or jump off the bus here, but it could also pose problems as we shift to a paradigm where identity is primarily performative. ![]() It possibly says something about how we see the world that we are more exact in our ability to label something, rather than to describe what it does. While we use different parts of speech with similar frequency the number of options available to us to use of one kind or other varies drastically. In general, though, nouns and verbs are the most common words, and conversation seems to use a higher proportion of verbs, adverbs and pronouns, while written English uses a higher proportion of nouns and adjectives.Īs a contemporary poet who writes in English I have been thinking a lot about this. These figures can give only a crude picture and show only the figures for one kind of written English. ![]() ![]() ![]() Corpus evidence used in the ‘Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ shows the following approximate frequencies of thousands of words per million: This is a complex question requiring a complex answer, because it all depends on what kind of language you examine.
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