The Unkenneling

My favorite word in all of Shakespeare is "unkennel."

"If his occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech, / It is a damned ghost that we have seen . . . "  

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 

A Le Moyne College professor noted that word more than fifty years ago. I remembered. 

Unkennel. You can picture it. Angry, growling dogs. Barking, drooling, panting with ravenous rage.

We used to use the term "go viral." That video went viral on YouTube. The tweet went viral in minutes. Their Facebook post went viral.

Viral? 

Coronavirus killed that. Or should.

The unkenneled coronavirus.

parade of verbs

evoke surrender leap land embrace trace summon abstain indulge accept taste sound smell feel grow become look remain know ignore swim float type breathe swallow link label remark mark make touch escape send receive listen learn hear inscribe imagine intuit undertake overtake assimilate

10 quotes on verbs, and other syntactical structures

1. Pork is not a verb. -- Bart Simpson
2. Life is a verb. -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3. Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. -- Martha Graham
4. Love is a verb. -- Clare Boothe Luce
5. Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail. -- Clive James
6. God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
7. The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive. -- W.R. Inge
8. If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
9. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. -- William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
10. I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. -- Dennis Miller
    

Twenty Verbs, Redux Again

let's try the infinitive forms of verbs today

1. to snow
2. to freeze
3. to shine
4. to shiver
5. to leap
6. to skip
7. to cry
8. to surprise
9. to cleave
10. to cling
11. to divitiate
12. to surbate
13. to aberuncate
14. to venditate
15. to surrender
16. to melt
17. to warm
18. to inosculate
19. to flob
20. to indagate

Twenty Verbs, II

On this the fourth anniversary of my brother's death, some participles and other forms for parting and otherwise:

1. grieving
2. remembering
3. raining
4. sitting
5. passed
6. wondered
7. said
8. mourning
9. missing
10. moving
11. breathing
12. exhaled
13. touched
14. tapped
15. laughed
16. cried
17. asked
18. answered
19. drifted
20. held

Twenty Verbs

Hey, you've all heard of Twenty Questions, why not Twenty Answers [which is an answer enveloped within a question]? Better yet, since verbs are more cogent than nouns, why not Twenty Verbs?

This may already be an Internet sensation I am unaware of. Maybe it will become a FW:FW:FW:FW ad infinitum Internet sensation.

No matter.

Here goes.

Twenty Verbs to describe my day, not necessarily in order or proper tense or mode or mood or voice:

1. awoke
2. ate
3. drove
4. talked
   
5. prayed
6. thanked
7. listened
8. watched
9. heard
10. walked
11. touched
12. washed
13. brushed
14. communed
15. sang
16. napped
17. meditated
    
18. saw
19. learned
20. read

You?

Listing Listfully and Listlessly

My life is cluttered, and lists are part of the clutter. Lists reside on tiny pieces of paper that I carry in my pockets, with the left side used more than the right. Lists abound on my desk on sticky Post-its of neon colors. I have even taken lately to drawing up a list at the start of the workday. It's an exhaustive list inventorying all the anticipated tasks of the day: responses to calls, e-mails, queries, comments, asides, requests, deadlines, and stated or implicit demands of disparate pieces of paper on my glass desk, a desk as transparent as my orderly attempts to rein in my rampant disorder. (I am ending this paragraph right here in homage to Lenny Cohen.)

Then I numerically rank each task, perhaps stopping at ten. Then I cross off each completed task.

This list-ordered tasking seems to settle me down and focus my efforts. It works until intrusions of yet other tasks.

Or does it work at all? And will it last?

List last.

Last list.

Lost lust.

Lust lost list last.

List lost lust last.

I just love the lilt of those four words.

Et cetera. Inter alia. Age quod agis.

Where was I?

If am without lists, does that make me listless?

Or do the lists themselves make me listless, tricking me into thinking listing equals doing?

In consulting my Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, I am thrilled to find the deep and criss-crossed layers of listing and its variants and associated forms. (Yes, such a finding thrills me, and I make no apologies for it.) The word list offers a rich playground for any list maker.

(But I will be brief. I need to pack for Berlin -- and alas I have for now successfully avoided lapsing into all kinds of blatant Wall metaphors, analogies, and paradigms.)

My OED tells me that list in some associated form or other (to say nothing of Franz Liszt!) refers to:

hearing,
the ear,
a border,
a hem (as in [ahem!] a silken piece of ooh-la-la! cloth you know where),
an earlobe,
part of a head of hair, such as a beard,
a scar,
a ring around the foot of a column,
a place of combat,
a staked enclosure (plural = the starting point of a race),
joy,
delight,
appetite,
craving,
lust (you knew it would come to that),
the careening of a ship (such as the ship of state embarking on certain courses of action),
a roll or catalog of words (such as This parade of nouns),
to please,
to care for,
to listen (I've barely begun to touch the verb forms)

insert ellipsis points here

This is just for starters. (Does that make it UNjust for finishers? hahahar!)

The list goes on.

Or could,

But I am getting listless.

Laugh. Or....

Else.