I might be the only one so enthralled, though, to be writing a new book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about verbs but were afraid to ask. That research is taking me deep into the library stacks, as I review the history of English, bone up on linguistics, and track down little-known texts. It’s also taking me deep into the narratives of some of my favorite writers, who know exactly when and how to deploy those little words to make sentences pulse.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Raban, describing the melancholy landscape of Eastern Montana, in Bad Land:

…In forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and when I wound down the window I heard it growl in the dry grass like surf. For gulls, there were killdeer plovers, crying out their name as they wheeled and skidded on the wind. Keel-dee-a! Keel-dee-a! The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea—it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged bluffs, hollow combers of bleached clay, and was fissured with waterless creek beds, ash-white, littered with boulders. Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. In the bottomlands, where muddy rivers trickled through the cottonwoods, were fenced rectangles of irrigated green.

Many people wouldn’t think to use so many verbs in a scene description: they wouldn’t think to show us a wind making waves and growling like surf; they wouldn’t hear the killdeer plovers crying out their name and wheeling and skidding. They wouldn’t see brown cows nibbling at their shadows and muddy rivers trickling through cottonwoods. This is the kind of passage I’m craving!

Do you have a favorite piece of writing, in which a true stylist uses verbs to such exquisite effect? Post it below, in the comments section! Or, if you’re shy, email me (connie-at-sinandsyntax.com). Please cite it properly, with the name of the author, the title of the book (fiction or nonfiction), and the chapter or page number where you found it.

I’d like to offer a little incentive: if it’s really good, so good that I decide to use it in the book, not only will I give you credit for finding it, I will send you a copy of a cool volume that has came across my desk: The Glamour of Grammar, by Roy Peter Clark (New York: Little, Brown, 2010). Clark explains that in Scottish English the word grammar (which once meant mastery of all arts and letters) evolved into glamour (which referred to a mastery of magic and enchantment).

Send me passages with verbs that are all magic and enchantment, and I’ll send you The Glamour of Grammar!

Related posts:

1. Grammar sites and blogs that bite
2. Grammar, in doorstoppers & handbooks
3. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch

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Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

Caesar proclaimed “veni, vidi, vinci.” Matthew reminded, “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” Bellow saw in every face in New York “the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Deadwood’s mayor E. B. Farnum, when he saw the Widow Garret, said, “She enters,” rather than the “There she is” of lesser mortals. And my dog? Well, you’d better believe that Homer understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “fetch.” (He wasn’t so good on “lie down.”)

Verbs have been called everything from “action words” to “the heartbeat of a sentence.” They have even been called The Almighty—by Buckminster Fuller:  “God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.” Verbs make the fulcrum of every sentence, the essence of any story. They put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.

Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a dynamic one, the passive voice and the active one, means knowing how to write purposefully and powerfully. In fact, understanding the verb means understanding English itself, for in English more than in other tongues, verbs enjoy a kind of primacy. Think about it: The word itself comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs, nor can we boast of verbal dexterity!

Yet, for all their primacy and vibrancy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch aims to change the way we think about verbs—and about language itself.

Beginning writers often ask me: “What is the one thing that will improve my work?” Aside from the obvious answer—read more, write more—I tell them to bone up on verbs.

Vex, Hex will take writers from the basics (static and dynamic verbs) to the esoteric (the indicative, the imperative, and the oh so subjunctive). It will set writers straight on objects and why it’s easy to use who and whom correctly. It upends conventional notions of verbs, sentences, and literature itself, marching from Caesar to Sorenson, from Woolf to The Wolfman, from Dickens to Didion, from Hemingway to JFK. And we won’t forget rappers like Dr. Dre, or TV writers like David Milch (Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire).

Vex, Hex also helps writers reinterpret the old rules for the new media landscape. The books show how verbs figure into the 140-character messages of Twitter and how they can elevate blogs into literature. (Or at least something worth reading.) This is a book for every writer trying to figure out how to rise above the digital din by crafting prose that is lean, powerful, and punchy.

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Doesn’t it sound like fun? Look for it in fall 2011. In the meantime, I’ll be creating a page here and inviting you to send in your favorite examples of writers who get verbs and how to use them to perk up their prose.

Related posts:

1. The Exquisite Corpse

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally. The name of the game allegedly derives from the phrase the Surrealists created when they first played the game, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the game: “Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”

OK, I’ll grant you that we didn’t exactly turn 109 Sever Hall at Harvard University into 54 rue du Chateau in Paris. But following the rule Subject/Transitive Verb/Direct Object we gave the Exquisite Corpse a good try, coming up with:

• The coffee beans sautéed the rooster.
• Vampires borrow snow.
• The conductor kicked the can.

Changing the rule to Subject/Static Verb/Complement, we got:

• The Easter Bunny is upset.
• Santa Claus was a worrywart.

Good enough for Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and André Breton? I’d say so.

Related posts:

1. Seven Deadly Sins