OSNews

Iggy Drougge: Sorry, my mistake. Generic has an intransitive use as well, forgot about that.

That would make rajan r's sentence pure nonsense, for you are now saying that he is making the non-existant object of the sentence more generic.

Iggy Drougge: BTW, that's Drougge with two GG's.

I had not noticed, but while we are on the subject, my screen name is never to be capitalized.

Iggy Drougge: Actually, the one pointing nonsense is Null_pointer and his kin.

What are you trying to say? One cannot "point nonsense." None of my family have posted here, nor have I seen anyone else reply to your posts on this subject.

If you are referring to the process of making nouns, adjectives, and adverbs out of verbs, that is a different thing altogether. Such verbs are called verbals, for they are governed by a set of rules which allows us to easily and unambiguously determine whether they are verbals or regular verbs and what they contribute to the meaning of the sentence. Your "verbs" either make no sense or have highly ambiguous meanings.

For example let us "invent" a new "verb" using your "verbification" method, i.e. I have bricked. That is not a valid sentence because there is no verb "brick" in the English language, and for the same reason the phrase has no meaning. Now, we could attempt to fill in the missing words by guessing at what the author intended to say and arrive at any of the following valid sentences:

I have layed bricks.
I have thrown bricks.
I have polished bricks.
I have painted bricks.
...

The point here is that by attempting to make an object which is capable of receiving a virtually infinite number of valid actions into a verb leaves us to guess at which action the "verb" - which is in reality an object - is receiving. The phrase "I have bricked" conveys nothing about which action took place. There is no verb in that sentence regardless of whether you intend to refer to the object as the verb.

Iggy Drougge: Even I, a non-native English speaker, uunderstood what Rajan, a non-native meant.

That is completely irrelevant to this discussion. I do not understand why you took offense to a bit of light-hearted irony, but I shall end this ridiculous discussion now. I am not interested in whether you understood what rajan r was trying to say, nor do I think that grammatical errors or typographical errors are necessarily indicative of a person's intelligence. I was merely pointing out that rajan r's criticism of the article's grammatical errors was itself full of grammatical errors; furthermore, such grammatical errors are commonplace in his posts. We call this irony. Next time please note that "hehe" and ";-)" do not accompany the adolescant, whining criticism which you seem to be accusing me of.

Iggy Drougge: It's not such a bad idea, that new verb of his, though the linguist in me would opt for a more full, classic verbification.

LOL