Is it just me or is the English language lacking in the number of verbs we have at our disposal?
Need an adjective?
No problem – Roget’s Thesaurus is literally brimming with them.
Verbs?
Well they’re another story altogether. Maybe it’s an intentional design and a matter of practicality. It’s got to be hard work coming up new words. To make matters worse, verbs not only require a present tense root, but also 3rd person and past tense version – forcing the originator to come up with 3 words for every one required.
Our language is so fluid, so evolving…yet verbs always seem to get the short end of the stick.
Mankind started riding horses centuries ago. Along came buggies, wagons, elevators, bicycles, trains, escalators, carousels, trolley cars, roller-coasters, skateboards, automobiles and spacecraft. I guess the wordsmiths decided ride was still a perfectly adequate way to describe the action. I’ll concede they all involve movement, but that’s where the similarities end. Nowadays the word ride just means too much. Sometimes it involves animals, sometimes it involves machines. It pertains to horizontal, vertical and circular motion. It’s too general a word. If we had more new, specific verbs we’d need a lot fewer adverbs.
Speaking of new words, why is it whenever a new noun hits the proverbial language market, no one sees fit to create a new verb for that noun. When the facsimile machine became the fax, were people just too lazy to come up with a word that described the act of faxing? The first person to utter the words, “Fax me the fax,” (find me a find, catch me a catch…) probably cringed and took it upon themselves to revert back to the word send.
And dial, (with the exception of my grandmother in Queens with her circa 1920 AT&T rotary model), who the hell still dials a phone?
We’re a creative people, why do we stand for this lack of descriptive verbs? Subcultures throughout our society are constantly coming up with new verbs. Surfers, rappers, teenagers, et al. have no problem coming up with new words, why does society on a whole continue to drag its feet? There’s got to be over 500 words that describe the act of sex, but we’re all fine using single verbs such as do or feel to describe such a multitude of acts?
The more I think about, the more I’m convinced English Scholars from around the world should convene a conference to remedy this problem and erase the shortcomings. On the upside, our language would be more descriptive and colorful. On the downside, from a student’s point-of-view, there would be quite a few more words in the dictionary…but at least there wouldn’t be so many definitions for each word. I’m no scholar, but I’d love the job. In the interest of full disclosure, I think I’m the only in the history of civilization to actually send resumes out to all the paint companies throughout the country seeking a position in the naming of all the new colors they invent.
So, I ask my fellow IMHO forum readers, do you have any verbs you’d like to create, modify the definition of or eliminate altogether? Perhaps there’s another lunatic out there who sees things the way I do. But dear God, I hope not!
