As Bill sauntered down the Citizenship isle of this tiny library, Barron's 501
English Verbs 2nd Ed. caught his eye. The moment he picked it up, he knew his
plan for the next few hours, to prepare for tomorrow's job interview, was toast.
His weakness was the language. Once laying his hands on a dictionary-sized
tome, he would start to comb through for unfamiliar words. It was an itch a
beaver would have felt in front of a tree.
"It must be for new immigrants" Bill thought. To him, immigrants were always
new, no matter how old they were or how long they had stayed in their adopted
country.
He was not disappointed. In the Essential 55 Verb List on page xxi, he spotted
one word that he had never spoken or written, heave. Long ago, he heard it in an
Irish song but that was it. He had by now studied the language for 38 years.
This was as embarrassing as exciting.
Most of the one-or-two-syllable words came as run-of-the-mill terms. But some
surprised Bill as he never knew them as colorful versatile verbs. From the 501,
he gleaned 46. The book lists conjugations but rarely definitions. Instead, it
supplements with examples. To give a taste, here were a few on Bill's shortlist.
- bare
They are baring their most precious secrets.
He bared his head as he entered the school.
Their innermost thoughts were bared in the course of the discussion.
[The AHD5 has another example: The dog bared its teeth.]
- jet
Lately, she's been jetting from coast to coast weekly.
Water jetted from the leaking pipe.
- rap
They are rapping the pipe to listen for defections.
The students rapped all night.
A hundred years ago, kids were rapped on the knuckles to get their attention.
- spring
The little boy sprang up with the correct answer.
The quiz was sprung on them with no warning.
Only when he came back two days later, did Bill find out how the 501 were
chosen, i.e.,
501 English Verbs gives the conjugations or conjugated forms of the
irregular and regular verbs most frequently used in speech and writing
and
I consulted the word frequency lists for the spoken language Word
Frequencies of Spoken American English (1979), by Hartvig Dahl, who notes
that 'only 848 words account for 90% of spoken usage' (p. vii). I have
included all verbs found in the first 1,000 words of the spoken sample.
Why didn't they test him on these that are "most frequently used in speech and
writing" instead of Mr. Yu's Latinate New Oriental GRE Vocabulary? It could've
made his landing in North America so much more sure-footed.
