1181. This week, we talk to Sarah L. Kaufman about verbs. We look at why English is a "manner verb" superpower and why babies often learn prepositions before actions. Then, we look at how choosing strong, dynamic verbs can actually save lives during a disaster and how specific words like "smash" can physically alter a witness's memory.
1181. This week, we talk to Sarah L. Kaufman about verbs. We look at why English is a "manner verb" superpower and why babies often learn prepositions before actions. Then, we look at how choosing strong, dynamic verbs can actually save lives during a disaster and how specific words like "smash" can physically alter a witness's memory.
Find Sarah L. Kaufman at sarahlkaufman.com
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Sarah L. Kaufman, author of this fabulous book, "Verb Your Enthusiasm." It's an entire book about verbs and it is, I have to tell you, wonderful. I wrote one of the blurbs for the book, and I said it was “actively useful. A book that makes you want to write,” and that is absolutely true, and I'm so delighted to welcome Sarah to the podcast. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Thank you, Mignon. So glad to be here.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, thank you for writing this wonderful book. So, one of the first things that popped into my mind is, is it intimidating to write a book about verbs?
Sarah L. Kaufman: You know, in some ways it was. The overall experience was, it was just tremendous fun because I loved going through literature to find great examples. That was just a joy. I loved talking to linguists and social scientists, cognitive scientists, about the effects of verbs on our bodies, about the origins of verbs and who pushes new language forms forward, you know, and where verbs come from. All that was absolutely fascinating to me and, you know, so many people were just extremely generous with their time.
I have a background not only as a writer and a journalist and arts critic—my specialty was dance—but also as a copy editor, which is how I started in journalism. So I've always had an interest in grammar and editing, but I did have a lot of questions and some qualms about, "Holy mackerel! I do not want to, like, get the grammar wrong in this book about grammar," which is somewhat about grammar, but there again, I relied on so many editing and writing friends of mine throughout the journalism world, copy editors and other grammarians, and just learned a lot myself. I think that was really the grand pleasure of this book was how much I learned about verbs and about our language.
Mignon Fogarty: So I'm curious if your first draft, if you went over the top and it was filled with just, like, dynamic, big, fancy verbs, the whole thing, or if you felt self-conscious about every verb you included in the book.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Well, that was definitely something I combed through afterwards and tried to make sure that having written a whole chapter on why the passive voice is problematic in so many instances, I wanted to make sure I was not, you know, that I was following my own advice. So that was definitely kind of a fun part of the editing process, actually.
And at one point in the book, I do take readers through my own crazy obsessiveness over finding the right verb for just a very basic sentence and knowing that I am, you know, putting forward a lot of advice and suggestions, that I wanted to make sure I made a good choice myself and that every verb I was grabbing for just sounded weird and awkward. And then finally I got, like, the logical choice was sort of staring me right in the face.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you remember what that sentence was?
Sarah L. Kaufman: Early in the book where I said something like, "Throughout my journalism career, I have [something] on verbs," you know? And what I ended up saying is, "I have relied on the power of verbs," Okay? What I think I started out was I started out with something like I have. Gosh it was something even more fancy than leaned on. I can't even remember whatever convoluted word I came up with at first as I was reading it over. I was like, "Yeek—fancy verb alert," because the fancy verbs are the ones that I have the strongest advice for readers to avoid.
You know the fancy verbs are kind of the pretentious ones, the ones that just sound a little awkward but puffed up, like "utilize" and "exude." You know people don't really say in conversation and they have a lot of extra syllables, and we have perfectly good, short, blunt verbs that, you know—"use". Or anything else besides "exude." I mean, "exude" just kind of brings to mind goopy, oozing you know. But anyway, blunt, simple words like "rely"—you know, "I have relied on verbs throughout my career"—gets right to the point.
Mignon Fogarty: That was one thing that was just fabulous about the book is all the examples. I found them just inspiring and instructive. Have you throughout your whole life, have you been saving these wonderful examples as you come across them, or did you spend, like, a year going through books looking for them while you were writing?
Sarah L. Kaufman: Well, I started working on this book during our wonderful year of COVID lockdowns. So, where I think a lot of people started writing books. Yeah, so I did go through a lot of literature and that was really fun. But, you know, I mean, I guess the origin story of this book comes from a couple of different events. One is that as a dance critic, which I was for 27 years at the "Washington Post," I wrote about a niche art form but a very exciting art form, and I wanted to reach a broad audience, so I decided to focus on how it felt and what it looked like to be in the theater with these marvelous dancers. You know, what was the visceral experience?
And in doing that, I had to write about action. I mean, dance is all action. And editors and writers, you know I heard some comments over the years about like, "Hey Sarah, you use verbs really well," which was kind of cool, kind of fun. And I thought, "Yeah, that makes sense” because it's part of my goal, right, was to share this excitement of the art form that I was writing about. So that was part of it.
But then the other part was when I started teaching, which I've done for a number of years—teaching writing—I found that students would just often get, kind of, like, verbs would kind of trip them up you know. Either they would use fancy verbs because, you know, that sort of sounds sophisticated to use sort of these big multi-syllabic verb constructions, or they would use dull verbs and that leads to dull writing. And so I guess putting those two things together is what led me to write the book. So I can't say that I spent my life sort of making a list of great verbs, but they rose up in my career kind of in an organic way all throughout my teaching and my writing.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they just add so much to the—it's like you have the perfect example for every point you're trying to make. It's just wonderful. You know, you're talking about your students. And I'll jump ahead a bit in my notes. One of the things that really shocked me is that babies learn prepositions before they learn verbs. And I think, you know, babies—they are action incarnate, and yet they learn verbs later. Like, why is that?
Sarah L. Kaufman: That was really interesting. That's in English-speaking babies, in particular, learn verbs last. It's kind of the last part of speech that they add to their vocabulary. So around a year or so, around the first birthday, babies might speak a noun or two, and then they you know will slowly accumulate more nouns—slowly or rapidly, as the case may be, accumulate more nouns—some prepositions, you know whether it's "mama," "cat," "dog," "cup," and then "on," "off," of course “no” you know interjections. But verbs come last and usually not until a child is approaching the second birthday.
And I talked about this with a linguist who is of Korean origin, and she has studied how babies who are from English-speaking families versus babies from Korean-speaking families learn verbs differently. And one reason that Korean children tend to learn verbs faster and earlier in life is because in Korean, the verb comes at the end of the sentence. So it's called a verb-final language. So instead of saying "I eat an apple," in Korean, the construction would be "I apple eat," and that final word of the sentence is more memorable. We remember it more because it's the last thing we heard.
So that's one theory, but another one is the way that English-speaking parents teach their children words versus the way Korean-speaking parents teach their children. And she did this interesting experiment with a book about an elephant, a picture book, that she had English-speaking parents and Korean-speaking parents show their children. So, and then she would study—she would observe how they spoke. And so the English-speaking parents would say, "Oh look, what is that? It's an elephant". So they're naming the noun.
And the Korean-speaking parents would say, "What is he doing? What is the elephant doing? Oh, he's jumping". So they would name the action. And, you know, why—I mean, she didn't really have, you know, it—this is like probably fruit for further studies. But Korean has a lot of words for how things fit in different containers, different shapes. Like it's so interesting to look at languages and what their specialties are, like where they have an expanded vocabulary in one area or another. But I just thought it was fascinating that children can learn actions, can learn events and the process of change—they can learn that faster—but it's just a question of the model that they're following.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And you said that English has, I think, more verbs of manner than most languages. What does that mean?
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yeah, that was also an interesting discovery. That was quite a surprise to me. It's like the hidden superpower of the English language is that the English language possesses just a magnitude of many times more verbs of manner than a lot of other languages. So linguists can categorize verbs in various different ways. I kind of simplified it in the book to stative verbs, basic verbs, and verbs of manner.
And the stative verbs are verbs that describe a state of being you know: be, understand, know, believe, appear. Basic verbs are like the neutral, the most neutral, ordinary action: walk, run, sit, eat. And then verbs of manner. That's where the fun comes in, right? That's like wiggle, wander, zoom, zigzag, stumble, crash, you know gobble. Those are all the verbs that are much more descriptive that tell us the manner in which an action is happening.
And in a lot of languages like French and Spanish, there may be only a dozen or a couple dozen, a few dozen verbs of manner. Like for the verb “jump,” there's one way to say “jump” in French. There's one way to say “jump” in Spanish. There's half a dozen or more ways to say “jump” in English—you can say bounce, bound, leap, boing, you know. You can come up with more; you can even invent more, which is also a fun feature of our language is that it is elastic enough, it allows for inventing words.
And in many languages, there's a fewer number of these verbs of manner, like “bounce” and “soar” and “leap.” English has many hundreds. And that gives writers enormous flexibility and possibilities for describing, for suggesting, for bringing images to mind, for lighting up subtle feelings inside the reader, for triggering responses and emotions because we can describe so much so fast and efficiently with just a verb.
Mignon Fogarty: And it's probably why maybe we don't need as many adverbs because our language is this way. You know you talk about you know I think that you and I probably both agree that the advice to get rid of all adverbs is over the top. But you can often pare down your adverbs when you choose a better verb. But you talked about some instances where adverbs are still good. So maybe talk about, in English, the way we combine adverbs with verbs and how we can do it in particularly good ways.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Right. I'm glad you brought that up because that is part of writing effective writing with verbs. I was about to say "effectively, writing effectively"—ooh, adverb alert! The thing is that sometimes, especially in spoken English, we speak the way we speak. And adverbs add a lot of rhythm and fill in gaps when maybe we're trying to think of the right word. But in written form, when we’re writing we're trying to craft something powerful and dramatic or just effective to get the message across.
Adverbs do clutter up. They are generally more than two syllables and they've got that "LY" ending—slowly, quickly—and often you know rhapsodically. I mean, you can go on and on and on with adverbs, but often they're unnecessary if you find a better verb. So instead of "he walked in clumsily on his crutches," you could say "he stumbled in on his crutches," right? You don't need the "clumsily" if you find something better and more descriptive than walk. So a verb, the verb "stumble" you know fills in for "walk clumsily".
And there are just many, many instances of that where it delivers a better picture. And it also underscores the advice that many many writers give and live by, which is showing versus telling. You know it's better to show than to tell, so you can show an action more quickly with just a verb that captures it versus telling with adverbs that give the manner in which something was done. But then we can sometimes find that manner verb, that verb of manner, that will do it all in one word.
Mignon Fogarty: It was interesting how you talked about using dynamic action verbs even for describing internal thought processes, feelings, and emotions. You can still use the good verbs.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Exactly. And one of the examples I use is from Virginia Woolf, who was such an amazing writer and a pioneer of interiority, which is kind of what a lot of novels are working with now. A lot of new novels are coming out with beautiful examples of interiority and interior events happening. And yet this can also be a landscape for dynamic change and process and action that can really come to life vividly with verbs.
So just suggesting, instead of naming emotions—"she felt nervous and anxious" so but "she wanted to hide her feelings so she tried not to look that way"— you know that's kind of a clumsy, long-winded way of expressing something. But you can still access that interiority by using more vivid verbs to show the nervousness. So, you know "her heart raced and hot fear spread down her chest and tangled up her insides. But to hide her feelings, she steeled her spine and lifted her chin." You know you can show these actions that don't name the emotions; they leave it up to the reader to fill in, which is so lovely, right? We like to be able to bring our own experiences to what we read so we can fill it in, and those actions suggest what's happening in a visceral way. And they bring the interior processes from the page right into our own bodies because we can identify with those actions that we've often felt ourselves.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, and it's just fascinating how the exact verb you choose can change how the reader or the listener perceives what has been communicated. You talked about a study where, I think it was, "smashed" versus "hit" changed the whole perception?
Sarah L. Kaufman: Right. So that was a really interesting study done by Elizabeth Loftus, who is a psychology professor at the University of California. And she studies memory and how words can change memories; memories change over time. And one of the ways is through the suggestive power of verbs, which she captured in this experiment where a group of participants watched police videos of a car accident.
And you know the first group was asked, "How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?" And another group, the second group was asked, "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" So the first group came up with an estimated mile-per-hour speed that was five or 10 miles slower than the group that heard the question as “how fast were they going when they "smashed into" each other?” So the only words that were different were the verbs or the verb phrase smashed into.
Mignon Fogarty:Yeah. And that's what I mean, the book, it made me want to go back into my writing and look at the verbs I'd used and think about how they might influence how people were perceiving what I was saying. It was just fascinating. What are some other examples where the very specific word choices can influence perception?
But it affected how these witnesses watching the same video remembered what they had just seen.
And indeed, there were other parts of the experiment where when hearing "smash" also affected how much broken glass they saw—whether they even saw broken glass or not, whether it was in the video or not. When they heard the question "how fast were they going when they smashed into each other?" there was an assumption that there was broken glass all over. I made so many interesting discoveries through talking with cognitive scientists about experiments on how language can change the way we perceive things.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and the book made me wanna go back into my writing and look at the verbs I'd used and think about how they might influence how people were perceiving what I was saying. It was just fascinating. What are some other examples where the very specific word choices can influence perception?
Sarah L. Kaufman: So another linguist that I spoke with, she’s a linguist and cognitive scientist, has studied how language affects people's tendency to evacuate from a natural disaster. Either quickly, or slowly, or to have more questions, or to, you know, react immediately. And how the wording of government warnings can affect this response time. And what she found was that warnings that came out, say for a wildfire, if they express the wildfire in very dynamic, vigorous ways like a monster—using monster metaphors and monster actions—people responded much more quickly.
So if a warning came out saying, "A fire is building and you need to leave quickly," Okay that's one way to do a warning. Another way which produced a much more quick response was, "The fire is devouring acres of land," you know, "It's raging across the landscape." And that would you know get people to move much more quickly. And these sound like very obvious examples, but in a disaster situation, when you’re hearing warnings coming across the airwaves or seeing them on your phone, you have so many questions, right? There's so much stress. You know, what’s my responsibility? What do I do? What do I tell my neighbors? How do I gather my family and my pets, and what do I bring? So to have a very quick and effective message is important in terms of motivating people in the right direction. Saying something is "raging," "rampaging," "tearing through," and “increasing alarmingly” that is a way to get people moving. And another way that we see that is in the headlines. So, again, with wildfires, you know the headlines are often written to connect them with monsters and monster actions—"devouring," "raging," "tearing through"—and this gets people's attention.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, if you're a news writer, or TV, or radio, or a print writer, the verbs you choose could save lives.
Sarah L. Kaufman: There you go. It's important. It gets the message, you know, gets the news delivered and, yeah, journalists and writers can take a lot of I think can take a lot of lessons from this that, you know, the idea of verbs is not just that they are necessary parts of speech, and they connect the subject with the object, they show an action, but that they can have effects on our bodies, on our minds. They can awaken you know little responses inside. They can transmit a lot of emotion, and they can just make the writing much more dynamic. So as a matter of style, verbs are extremely important. And I felt like it was a kind of an underrated phenomenon that you don't really hear too much about the power of verbs in writing. A lot of my students, for example, would say, "I usually struggle over the adjectives but I don't think about verbs." And it’s like the description is always fun, you know, fun for a lot of writers. Fun for a lot of students to get into, and that may involve more nouns and adjectives. But you can also make your writing just streamlined and super effective by focusing on the verbs.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And I think the other thing that surprised me, the final thing I wanna talk about is verb tense, because I think people don't think about verb tense hardly at all. The only questions I ever get about it are from people who are learning English as a second language. But I was surprised to see that the verb tense you use to describe something, again, can change how people perceive the action actually happened.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Exactly. And this came from another study that where I spoke to the scientist who led the study was about, in terms of, saying something happened in the past, like "Joe painted a lot of houses last summer" versus "Joe was painting a lot of houses last summer” can affect how many houses, you know, how much work we assume that he was doing. So "was painting" gives a sense of the action extending into time and thus you know accomplishing more.
Whereas in an example from politics: "The candidate was accused of taking bribes last summer" versus "The candidate had been accused of taking bribes last summer." You know it just gives like different subtle senses of: did the action start and stop? And is it over with? Is it kind of ongoing? Is there like a fuzzy ending? And these are also things to be aware of as we're writing because they may seem to convey the same thing that something took place in the past. But how do we define that past, you know, even in a subtle way? What are the nuances there in the verb tense?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, it’s really it’s just amazing it really drives home how much verbs matter. I have to say I've read the book twice now already. I read it, you know, a while ago when I wrote the blurb, and then I read it again to prepare for the interview. And I don’t reread books—ever—but this is one that I could imagine rereading every year or two just for inspiration and to keep my mind focused on how much verbs matter. It really was that excellent of a book. And I can see why Sarah is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for her work as a dance critic at the "Washington Post." And in the bonus segment, we're gonna talk about that work and how it informed her writing of this book, and another book she's written called "The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life". We'll talk about how the verbs mattered in that and how you can gracefully use your verbs. And then we will get her book recommendations. So Sarah, thank you again so much for being here.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Thank you, Mignon. I really appreciate it. It's been so much fun.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet, and where can people find you if they want to connect with you online?
Sarah L. Kaufman: So my website is sarahlkaufman.com.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Sarah L. Kaufman: Yeah, thank you.