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#116376 11/22/03 02:00 PM
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Last night when I was looking up high-falutin', one of the sites had a list of related words. One of these in particular stood out to me, because I didn't know it and because I liked the sound of it: bedizen. Today's Word of the Day on Gurunet: bedizen. (To dress or adorn with gaudy finery or vulgarity.)


#116377 11/22/03 02:12 PM
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<Twilight Zone theme music>




formerly known as etaoin...
#116378 11/22/03 05:43 PM
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A gerund IS a present participle

Must of was a passing fad. This site says they're different, the gerund is a verb pretending to be a noun and the present participle a verb pretending to be an adjective.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_verbals.html#ger-part

Of course with nouns and adjectives cross-dressing so much these days, who knows? In Latin you could tell the diffenece just by looking, but then, they were a little stricter with the moral codes in them days. Nowadays we have verbs pretending to be adjectives acting as nouns and pretending to be nouns acting as adjectives. The whole thing just sets up a spinning in my head.


#116379 11/22/03 09:21 PM
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There's a new book coming out soon:

"The Trials and Tribulations of a Grammatical Prescriptivist" by Faldage. Published by Arachaic Notions Press ...


#116380 11/22/03 09:38 PM
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This is description, pure and simple, Pfranz.


#116381 01/05/04 09:52 PM
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W
wwh Offline
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W
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From Menken:
Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are in good use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841; highfalutin in a political speech of the same decade.


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