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  1. Sapir
    anthropologist and linguist
    In the 1920's, Edward Sapir wrote that "no logical scheme of the parts of speech — their number, nature and necessary confines — is of the slightest interest to the linguist."
  2. intransitive verb
    a verb (or verb construction) that does not take an object
    That intransitive verb, meaning roughly "to relax," was expanded to chill out in 1983, according to The Oxford English Dictionary.
  3. maven
    one who is very skilled in or knowledgeable about a field
    This "functional shifting," as grammarians call it, is a favorite target of language mavens, whose eyebrows rise several inches when nouns like impact and access are verbed.
  4. jalopy
    a car that is old and unreliable
    At this very moment, the language is being regenerated with phrases like my bad, verbs like dumb down and weird out and guilt ("Don't guilt me") and even the doubly anthimeric "Pimp My Ride," an MTV series in which a posse of artisans take a run-down j
  5. intransitive
    designating a verb that does not require or cannot take a direct object
    That intransitive verb, meaning roughly "to relax," was expanded to chill out in 1983, according to The Oxford English Dictionary.
  6. Ecclesiastes
    an Old Testament book consisting of reflections on the vanity of human life; is traditionally attributed to Solomon but probably was written about 250 BC
    Fast-forward to 1979, when the song "Rapper's Delight" worked a variation on Ecclesiastes, explaining that "There's. . .a time to break and a time to chill/To act civilized or act real ill."
  7. rococo
    having excessive asymmetrical ornamentation
    Some more rococo anthimerian endeavors have clear meanings, but are more or less im-parse-able.
  8. magisterial
    of or relating to a civil officer who administers the law
    Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum's magisterial 2002 "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" counts pronouns as a subset of nouns, replaces articles with a new category called "determinatives" (which also includes words like this, some and every) and divides conjunctions into "coordinators" (and, but and or) and "subordinators" (like whether).
  9. rudiment
    the elementary stage of any subject
    There was a lot of shuffling around, until Joseph Priestley's 1761 "Rudiments of English Grammar" finally established the baseball-size lineup that included adjectives and booted out participles.
Created on Mon Nov 08 15:12:05 EST 2010 (updated Mon Nov 08 15:14:46 EST 2010)

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