Defined Words

Some more rococo anthimerian endeavors have clear meanings, but are more or less im-parse-able.

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).

Even in our own tradition, the roster keeps shifting.

Shakespeare was a pro at this; his characters coined verbs — "season your admiration," "dog them at the heels" — and such nouns as design, scuffle and shudder.

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.

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."

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 jalopy and sleek it up into a studly vehicle containing many square yards of plush velvet and an astonishing number of LCD screens.

The fact is, any parts-of-speech scheme leaves gaping holes.

Some more rococo anthimerian endeavors have clear meanings, but are more or less im-parse-able.

By BEN YAGODA
Published: July 9, 2006
The notion of dividing words into discrete parts of speech is generally credited to the ancient Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax.

They make possible not only Mad Libs but also the rhetorical device anthimeria — using a word as a noncustomary part of speech — which is the reigning figure of speech of the present moment.

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."