I love it when the things I write produce an emotional response. For a writer, it’s the biggest buzz in the world when someone comes to you and says, “That short story/chapter/poem made me so sad/happy/hungry*.”

I always strive to create something that is going to play on the reader’s conscience, to make them contemplate whether the actions within the story are right or wrong. Or better yet, I love making people side with the bad guy and question what sort of a person that makes them.

Despite all my good intentions though, anger seems to be the easiest emotion to evoke in others.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get a cheap thrill out of that but it’s just so easy on the internet. A little too easy, perhaps. One of my posts, ‘Consider a Modern Wife’, has an entire page dedicated to how it – and I by proxy – is wrong, despite the fact that said post only had 32 readers at its initial upload.  I was also spammed with messages from people I know on facebook following my piece concerning that most disgusting of language errors – ‘might of’. Apparently, I’m ignorant as to the history of my country and as a language student ’should know better’.

I could take the time to explain that I spent four years of my life not only learning Danish, but also reading about the common Germanic stem that it shares with English. Or I could boast about the fact that my current favourite book is Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue and that I spend my free time compiling a list of Doric words that come from Nordic stems. I could write lengthy paragraphs about how invasions from the Vikings and the French have perverted the original form of the language that was used when Beowulf was first scribbled down by monks, or about how the unique ‘ing’ verb form makes English a wonderfully easy language to learn the basics of for foreign speakers**.

But honestly, who gives a toss?

This is the internet: it is estimated that there are over 60 million ‘blogs worldwide and of those, only a handful achieve a readership of over 1000 per day. I write on here because I feel that doing so empties my head of clutter and helps me to be a better writer. I also like to think that my ‘blog is a good showcase for the selection of writing styles I can offer to any potential clients. I don’t for one minute believe that my work could ever be widely read in the way that Diary of a London Call Girl was.

With the exception of family and friends -  who know me well enough to understand that I’m just a crotchety old woman – nobody cares about what I have to say. I’m just another one of the faceless people who sit tapping away at their laptop keyboard instead of getting on with their work. My opinions, therefore, do not matter to anyone other than myself. Just like the opinions of those who think I’m wrong don’t matter to me – the age-old internet stalemate. Because neither party involved in an argument over opinions has to face the other, and because people online are inherantly rude to each other, we end up with arguments like this:

Me: Blah blah blah – hate world – blah blah – romantic notions about how things should be – blah.
Someone else: U hv penis.
Me: Eh? What has that got to do with anything?
Someone else: U jst scared coz u wrong.
Me: Wrong in which way? I like discussions – let’s talk and share our thoughts.
Someone else: U 2 scared to talk bk. ha ha ha ha… penis.
Me: You’re a spoon.

The other problem with the internet is that sites like twitter, facebook, myspace, friendface etc. make us believe that what we say has an impact on those around us. We use the web as a way to express ourselves and without the social boundaries enforced by real life, we’re not afraid to express ourselves in overly critical, arrogant ways. We presume that because we can broadcast information about our goings on and opinions at all hours of the day, that we should. This is not the case. My rule of internet etiquette is as follows: if you wouldn’t say face-to-face what you’ve just typed, hit the backspace key instead of enter***. Afterall, you don’t want to hear about my various bodily functions so what makes you think I want to read about yours?

I think this is what I was trying to say in my entry about lamebook – we’ve all become self-obsessed and presume that the rest of the world cares about what we think and about every intimate detail of our lives. Nobody does, and so after the initial thrill of causing an angry reaction in my online reader for whatever reason, I feel slightly hollow – as if the emotion’s I’ve managed to trigger aren’t real. With so many people out there looking for yet another way to tell the world about themselves, it’s just too easy to have someone disagree.

______

*Hungry is an emotion. I spend 95% of my life ‘hungry’. The other 5% I spend sleeping.

**Interestingly, all objections to my statement that English is an easy language to learn came from native speakers, rather than from those who use it as a second language.

***If you’re drunk, slightly different rules apply,  akin to those necessary where mobile phones are concerned. On becoming inebriated to the point where you think the following messages to your friends are a good idea, all communication devices must be handed to the designated driver or, if at home,  hidden in either the sewing machine case or the vegetable drawer.

Examples of messages to friends that are a terrible idea are:
a. You’re sexy
b. I’m sexy
c. The ex you still have feelings for is sexy and I just saw them naked
d. Did your car have a bonnet when you loaned it to me?

What are Verbs?

The verb is king in English. The shortest sentence contains a verb. You can make a one-word sentence with a verb, for example: “Stop!” You cannot make a one-word sentence with any other type of word.

Verbs are sometimes described as “action words”. This is partly true. Many verbs give the idea of action, of “doing” something. For example, words like run, fight, do and work all convey action.

But some verbs do not give the idea of action; they give the idea of existence, of state, of “being”. For example, verbs like be, exist, seem and belong all convey state.

A verb always has a subject. (In the sentence “John speaks English”, John is the subject and speaks is the verb.) In simple terms, therefore, we can say that verbs are words that tell us what a subject does or is; they describe:

* action (Ram plays football.)
* state (Anthony seems kind.)

There is something very special about verbs in English. Most other words (adjectives, adverbs, prepositions etc) do not change in form (although nouns can have singular and plural forms). But almost all verbs change in form. For example, the verb to work has five forms:

* to work, work, works, worked, working

Of course, this is still very few forms compared to some languages which may have thirty or more forms for a single verb.

In this lesson we look at the ways in which we classify verbs, followed by a quiz to test your understanding:

1. Helping Verbs

Imagine that a stranger walks into your room and says:

* I can.
* People must.
* The Earth will.

Do you understand anything? Has this person communicated anything to you? Probably not! That’s because these verbs are helping verbs and have no meaning on their own. They are necessary for the grammatical structure of the sentence, but they do not tell us very much alone. We usually use helping verbs with main verbs. They “help” the main verb. (The sentences in the above examples are therefore incomplete. They need at least a main verb to complete them.) There are only about 15 helping verbs.

2. Main Verbs

Now imagine that the same stranger walks into your room and says:

* I teach.
* People eat.
* The Earth rotates.

Do you understand something? Has this person communicated something to you? Probably yes! Not a lot, but something. That’s because these verbs are main verbs and have meaning on their own. They tell us something. Of course, there are thousands of main verbs.

In the following table we see example sentences with helping verbs and main verbs. Notice that all of these sentences have a main verb. Only some of them have a helping verb.
helping verb main verb
John likes coffee.
You lied to me.
They are happy.
The children are playing.
We must go now.
I do not want any.

HELPING VERBS

Helping verbs are also called “auxiliary verbs”.

Helping verbs have no meaning on their own. They are necessary for the grammatical structure of a sentence, but they do not tell us very much alone. We usually use helping verbs with main verbs. They “help” the main verb (which has the real meaning). There are only about 15 helping verbs in English, and we divide them into two basic groups:
Primary helping verbs (3 verbs)

These are the verbs be, do, and have. Note that we can use these three verbs as helping verbs or as main verbs. On this page we talk about them as helping verbs. We use them in the following cases:

* be
o to make continuous tenses (He is watching TV.)
o to make the passive (Small fish are eaten by big fish.)

* have
o to make perfect tenses (I have finished my homework.)

* do
o to make negatives (I do not like you.)
o to ask questions (Do you want some coffee?)
o to show emphasis (I do want you to pass your exam.)
o to stand for a main verb in some constructions (He speaks faster than she does.)

Modal helping verbs (10 verbs)

We use modal helping verbs to “modify” the meaning of the main verb in some way. A modal helping verb expresses necessity or possibility, and changes the main verb in that sense. These are the modal verbs:

* can, could
* may, might
* will, would,
* shall, should
* must
* ought to

Here are examples using modal verbs:

* I can’t speak Chinese.
* John may arrive late.
* Would you like a cup of coffee?
* You should see a doctor.
* I really must go now.

MAIN VERBS

Main verbs are also called “lexical verbs”.

Main verbs have meaning on their own (unlike helping verbs). There are thousands of main verbs, and we can classify them in several ways:
Transitive and intransitive verbs

A transitive verb takes a direct object: Somebody killed the President. An intransitive verb does not have a direct object: He died. Many verbs, like speak, can be transitive or intransitive. Look at these examples:

transitive:

* I saw an elephant.
* We are watching TV.
* He speaks English.

intransitive:

* He has arrived.
* John goes to school.
* She speaks fast.

Linking verbs

A linking verb does not have much meaning in itself. It “links” the subject to what is said about the subject. Usually, a linking verb shows equality (=) or a change to a different state or place (>). Linking verbs are always intransitive (but not all intransitive verbs are linking verbs).

* Mary is a teacher. (mary = teacher)
* Tara is beautiful. (tara = beautiful)
* That sounds interesting. (that = interesting)
* The sky became dark. (the sky > dark)
* The bread has gone bad. (bread > bad)

Dynamic and stative verbs

Some verbs describe action. They are called “dynamic”, and can be used with continuous tenses. Other verbs describe state (non-action, a situation). They are called “stative”, and cannot normally be used with continuous tenses (though some of them can be used with continuous tenses with a change in meaning).

dynamic verbs (examples):

* hit, explode, fight, run, go

stative verbs (examples):

* be
* like, love, prefer, wish
* impress, please, surprise
* hear, see, sound
* belong to, consist of, contain, include, need
* appear, resemble, seem

Regular and irregular verbs

This is more a question of vocabulary than of grammar. The only real difference between regular and irregular verbs is that they have different endings for their past tense and past participle forms. For regular verbs, the past tense ending and past participle ending is always the same: -ed. For irregular verbs, the past tense ending and the past participle ending is variable, so it is necessary to learn them by heart.

regular verbs: base, past tense, past participle

* look, looked, looked
* work, worked, worked

irregular verbs: base, past tense, past participle

* buy, bought, bought
* cut, cut, cut
* do, did, done

Regular Verbs

English regular verbs change their form very little (unlike irregular verbs). The past tense and past participle of regular verbs end in -ed, for example:

work, worked, worked

But you should note the following points:

1. Some verbs can be both regular and irregular, for example:

learn, learned, learned
learn, learnt, learnt

2. Some verbs change their meaning depending on whether they are regular or irregular, for example “to hang”:
regular hang, hanged, hanged to kill or die, by dropping with a rope around the neck
irregular hang, hung, hung to fix something (for example, a picture) at the top so that the lower part is free

3. The present tense of some regular verbs is the same as the past tense of some irregular verbs:
regular found, founded, founded
irregular find, found, found

Irregular Verbs List

This is a list of some irregular verbs in English. Of course, there are many others, but these are the more common irregular verbs.
V1 V2 V3

awake awoke awoken
be was, were been
beat beat beaten
become became become
begin began begun
bend bent bent
bet bet bet
bid bid bid
bite bit bitten
blow blew blown
break broke broken
bring brought brought
broadcast broadcast broadcast
build built built
burn burned/burnt burned/burnt
buy bought bought
catch caught caught
choose chose chosen
come came come
cost cost cost
cut cut cut
dig dug dug
do did done
draw drew drawn
dream dreamed/dreamt dreamed/dreamt
drive drove driven
drink drank drunk
eat ate eaten
fall fell fallen
feel felt felt
fight fought fought
find found found
fly flew flown
forget forgot forgotten
forgive forgave forgiven
freeze froze frozen
get got gotten
give gave given
go went gone
grow grew grown
hang hung hung
have had had
hear heard heard
hide hid hidden
hit hit hit
hold held held
hurt hurt hurt
keep kept kept
know knew known
lay laid laid
lead led led
learn learned/learnt learned/learnt
leave left left
lend lent lent
let let let
lie lay lain
lose lost lost
make made made
mean meant meant
meet met met
pay paid paid
put put put
read read read
ride rode ridden
ring rang rung
rise rose risen
run ran run
say said said
see saw seen
sell sold sold
send sent sent
show showed showed/shown
shut shut shut
sing sang sung
sit sat sat
sleep slept slept
speak spoke spoken
spend spent spent
stand stood stood
swim swam swum
take took taken
teach taught taught
tear tore torn
tell told told
think thought thought
throw threw thrown
understand understood understood
wake woke woken
wear wore worn
win won won
write wrote written

Englishclub.com

@m To increase quickly to a high level
@u Her temperature soared
@u The price of petrol has soared in recent weeks
@u Soaring unemployment

Background: The use of constraint-induced treatment in aphasia therapy has yielded promising but mixed results.

Aims: We conducted a treatment study with an individual with chronic non-fluent aphasia. The goal of the treatment was to improve verb production in sentence and narrative contexts.

Methods & Procedures: We administered a modified constraint-induced aphasia treatment in a single-participant design. Treatment emphasised the production of verbs within informative exchanges. Verb production in narratives was assessed before and after the treatment.

Outcomes & Results: Results demonstrated a significant increase in the number of verbs produced during narrative generation following treatment. Moreover, a positive change was perceived by nave listeners who rated the social-communicative impact of the participant’s narratives.

Conclusions: The increase in verb production seen in the post-treatment measures is attributed to a combination of the constraints imposed on sentence production during the treatment sessions, the informative nature of the treatment exchanges, and the relative intensity of the treatment schedule.
* We thank Kathryn Tison for her help in administering the treatment and coding the data, and Lauren Nehilla and Jen Lyonnais for their help with data entry. We are grateful to Laura Glufling-Tham and Amy Litwack for their assistance prior to and during data collection. We also thank Marianne Schmid Mast and Nora Murphy for providing their Conversation Perception questionnaire. And we thank our participant for taking part in this study. We are also grateful to Marcus Meinzer and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. Support for Mira Goral was provided by NIH grant GM081113.

from Aphasiology

This was one of my first ever spoken word pieces….enjoy

I vibe off a thought try to write a little poetry
Wont put my name on it but still you know it’s me
Subject, flow, timing, vocabulary
Hints of emotion, lo and behold you know it’s me

The plain and simple
The unspectacular
Till I fight into your senses
With adjectives to back me up
Against a wall of truth
I survive on the unseen eternal fruits

You see I have an underground vineyard
Everything I produce connoisseurs wanna sample the
Laboured for fruits of my youth
In a quake off the Richter scale my roots wouldn’t move
And I have nothing to prove for I’m that deep

Reluctantly fashionable I only work for big companies yet its not big company I keep
And I hold real not prototyped hyped new age beliefs

I am the topside of a chocolate digestive
Provoking gluttonous lusts yet the most resisted
So I take calculated risks if victory exists
And at the site of beauty I just lick my lips
For its just its…
The don king of moments
The little bit of crazy that everyone goes with

The versatile black that flows with any outfit
Make gold look good
Softly spoken realist
Spiritual apprentice
I was bought by love
Will never be rented
I AM

What is a reflexive verb? Wikipedia gives a semantic definition: a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself. However, I’d prefer to say that a reflexive verb is one that enters into reflexive constructions, that is, grammatical constructions that can have a reflexive meaning. In Swedish and English, these constructions involve the use of reflexive pronouns. In Swedish, the reflexive pronouns are mig, dig, sig, oss, er, sig; that is, the same as the object pronouns apart from the third person sig. In English, the reflexive pronouns are myself, yourself, himself, etc. In English, reflexive pronouns can also be used as intensifiers; the equivalent Swedish intensifier is själv.

Swedish verbs can enter into reflexive constructions in more ways than English verbs. Some have direct equivalents in English:

Jag tvättar mig.

I wash myself.

Words like the above also have the same meaning in English and Swedish when used in a normal (nonreflexive) transitive sense, with or without the intensifier:

Jag tvättade bilen. Jag tvättade bilen själv.

I washed the car. I washed the car myself.

However, there are also many transitive/reflexive pairs which differ somewhat in meaning, such as lära (teach)/lära sig (learn), tänka (think)/tänka sig (imagine). Compare the following; both are reflexive constructions in Swedish, but only one is in English:

Sara lär sig finska. Sara lär sig finska själv.

Sara is learning Finnish. Sara is teaching herself Finnish.

Some Swedish verbs can only be used reflexively, such as bete sig (behave), försova sig (oversleep), huka sig (crouch down), bry sig om (care about).

And then (although this is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list), there is a group of verbs where the meaning is of having something done to oneself by someone else, a reflexive construction but not one that fits neatly with the simple (agent=patient) definition of reflexive: klippa sig (get one’s hair cut), vaccinera sig (get vaccinated) (if you can!).

Subject-verb agreement

          This syntax issue can really bedevil writers, especially students who are still struggling a little with the myriad of rules and regs. Perhaps part of the problem with this guideline is the word “agreement.” We all know the meaning of “agree” as in “You and I will never agree,” or “We will agree to disagree,” but when we talk about subject-verb agreement, we’re actually talking about something entirely different. In this case “agree” means matching subjects and verbs according to number. That is, when you have a singular subject, you have to match it with a singular verb: The dog runs. When you have a plural subject, you must have a plural verb form: The dogs run.

In short sentences we can hear the problem: The dogs runs just doesn’t sound right so we can usually make the necessary changes to The dogs run.

There are, however, three problems that can crop up:

• Prepositional phrases
• Indefinite pronouns
• Reversed sentence order

 Prepositional phrases consist of words that slip in between the subject and the verb. The dogs in the mudroom is dirty. The noun “mudroom” may be singular making us think, perhaps, that the following verb “is” should be singular as well. But the subject is “dogs.” Take out the prepositional phrase in the mudroom and we’re left with the sentence The dogs is dirty, which is clearly not correct. The correct verb should be “are” as in “The dogs in the mudroom are dirty.”

We only need to remember one thing about indefinite pronouns: if a word has one of these endings: everybody, everyone, anyone, anything, etc., it is singular. We can also include each, either, and neither in this group.

• Everyone is going…
• Each is taking the train…
• If anyone comes later…

The normal pattern for English sentence order is subject-verb. There are, however, a few cases where this order is reversed. For instance:

          There are dogs in the kitchen.  The standard order would be Dogs are there in the kitchen. Or some such version that places the subject and verb in the standard order.

          Where are they? Or:  They are where?

          We would not write or say There is dogs in the kitchen, or They is where?

          Easy this is, yes?

          Thank you Yoda, but not always.

It’s not unusual to find misspelled names on Yahoo! Shine, like Stanley Burrell’s:

And it’s not unusual to find a grammatically incorrect verb:

Sadly, this isn’t the first time resurgence has been misspelled, either:

They know that subjects and verbs need to agree, even in questions. The following headline is disagreeingly blaring at Free Software Magazine:

Yikes! Of course, this should be “Is Microsoft to blame…”

In this question, Microsoft is the subject, not costs. Thus, the singular form of the verb to be is required.

Reading this almost makes my ears bleed. Will Free Software Magazine be liable for my medical bills?

…pentru tauri:

“A DORI”

eu…imi doresc perdeaua aia de 1 metru latime si 1 milion de lei vechi lungime.

imi mai doresc si chitara aia “folk” de 2 jumate, de pe care nu imi mai puteam desprinde mana in supermarket. fetita vroia sa zdrangane si ea, dar nu ajungea la corzi. i-am luat manuta si ea s-a ridicat pe varfuri. a zdranganit numai o data si a fugit la mami.

mi-as dori sa pot iesi o data din supermarket  cu portofelu intact.

dar nu pot.

e mai plin decat panarama de “G magazin” si ma tenteaza sa las de fiecare data acolo cate o perdea, o jumate de chitara sau o jumate de palton lung…

am cam tot ce imi doream.

n-am o casa.

nici piscina

nici macar “mertzan 1300″…

n-am copii

nici caine…

mica maimuta e a bunicii, nu a mea!

n-am bicicleta, role,

permis auto,

chef de ceva,

cizme sexy de iarna,

menajera,

acvariu cu pesti pe post de perete in living,

living,

chirie mai mica,

salar mare,

realizari majore,

sanatate de fier,

masele “bune”,

par stralucitor,

masa extensibila,

masa robusta,

pat king size,

decor oriental,

cada mare,

rabdare, calm…

si nici macar habar de ce intampla in lumea asta mare…

dar am aproape tot ce mi-am dorit.

pentru ca “a dori” e verbul reprezentativ pentru tauri…

It must be a severe grammatical impairment that accounts for the errors by a writer for Yahoo! Shine:

Maybe the grammatically impaired make up a new protected class, and Yahoo! has a legal obligation to make “reasonable accommodations” for the handicap. In this case, I’d recommend a competent editor—one who can match a verb with its subject and knows when to use we instead of us.

The writer of this headline on the Yahoo! front page should plead guilty to a subject-verb felony charge:

I’ve been studying verbs that describe cutting and breaking, events of material separation, or C&B if you will [Majid A, et al. How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages. Cognitive Linguistics 2007; 18(2): 179-194]. It turns out that this is an interesting thing to study across languages, because C&B is a fairly universal concept (tools for the purpose having been fashioned millions of years ago), and because C&B events involve what we may regard as prototypical verbs: somoeone does something to something, resulting in a change of state.

But then it gets complicated. Languages typically have over 20 verbs that can be used to describe C&B events. Some events are associated with a specific verb (saw), whereas some aren’t (crush, pound, pulverise, smash).

The simple answer to last week’s question: in English, both the scissors and the knife cut. In Swedish there is no single word for cut; what scissors do is klippa (same origin as English clip), and what knives do is skära (same origin as English shear). As with English, German has a single word for cut (schneiden), whereas Dutch has the scissors/knife distinction (knippen/snijden). English/German/Dutch/Swedish all have a specific word for saw (saw/sägen/zagen/såga).

Interesting, but so what? Well, it does have implications for both second language learning and translation. My Norstedts Stora Engelsk-Svenska Ordbok, under cut, lists skära, hugga, klippa, snoppa, meja av, slå, fälla, utesluta, and more, with little indication of how to choose between them. Examples for klippa are (I quote) “[~ a film (tape); ~ a hedge]“. From the above, I would have thought of cutting hair as a good obvious example. Using klippa for hedges makes me think of some sort of large pair of scissors, but in fact, the electric instrument typically used for cutting hedges is a häcksax (hedge-scissors) (at right), and it certainly has more than one blade. The same dictionary also has an entry hedge-cutter = häckklippare. I hope that’s all clear now!

A final note: scissors (plural) = en sax (singular). Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Next week:

What’s in the bottle? (Hint: What’s in the box?)

Surfeit

Noun (usually singular): an excessive amount of something, (archaic) an illness caused or regarded as being caused by excessive eating or drinking.

Verb (transitive):  cause (someone) to desire no more of something as a result of having consumed or done it to excess; (intransitive, archaic) consume too much of something.

Surfeit is just excess in another guise.  For example, many home gardeners suffer from a surfeit of zucchini late in the summer.  I like surfeit because it can also be used as a verb.  Say, for example, you just finished an eighteen hour road trip, you might say that you are surfeited with driving.

‘ Give or Bring back ’

USE :

The government has agreed to restitute artworks seized by the Nazis during WW2.

Vet

Verb (transitive):  make a careful and critical examination of (something); (often be vetted) British, investigate (someone) thoroughly, especially in order to insure that they are suitable for a job requiring security, loyalty or trustworthiness.

Vet describes the process  most people indicate when they say they are double checking something.  For example, if you are writing a paper or an essay or an article, you may vet your sources by checking to make sure they are reputable and have the qualifications to make the assertions they make.  The word can also be applied to a person.  Say that you are being considered for a job or a club, the organization you want to join may go through a vetting process where they check your qualifications against those of the position you would like to attain.    Vet has slightly academic ring to it, but I like it for its precision in describing the process of critically evaluating something or someone.

For a conversation about words, usage and etymology follow this link to a conversation with ‘the word guru.’

[ e-ch ]

To crave something . design , letters.

USE :

John asked me to etch his name on his pen.