Bill,[snip]
You are right. English is an infinitely permutational language. You can use words in any way - using nouns for verbs, or adjectives. English happily steals words and concepts from other languages without any bother. (Note the French Academy's attempts to clean pristine French of intruders like "weekend".)
My favorite English word is "cleave". This means "to cling " "to adhere". But it also means "to divide" "to split".
What a great language!
My favorite word is
OVERSIGHT
The oversight committee's oversights enabled the CFO to suck the life out of the company like that giant waterbug sucking up the liquified innards of a large frog in Annie Dillard's _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_.
Then there are words that are not as bad as what they sound like, e.g., "prudence" does not mean devotion to expunging sexual material from library books.
And, of course, my all time favorite transitive verb: Volunteer, as in:
We volunteer you to go done that VC tunnel (or into that reactor chamber where failed cooling lines are gushing lethal radiation all ovber the place...)....
Then there is the fascinating verb: "to listen", when used by parents, schoolmarms and other self-righteous agents of god's judgment up0on earth.
When a parent tells a child: "You are not listening!", the parent does not generally mean that the child has failed to acoustically register or semantically decode what the parent said.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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