Barron's 501 English Verbs

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.

[7grizzly]

回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 : Thank you, 暖冬, for reading and liking.

He had long noticed the differences between the ways he and western people talk. He had a lot to say about the subject. But this book hit home and at the same time, became one of Bill's best discoveries.

His GRE scores were just good enough to land him a ticket to the west :-)

Happy hump day!

[暖冬cool夏]

>>> The plan was toast.== toast is new to me though. A slang meaning "to be doomed, ruined or in trouble." Was the interview recent? How was it?

>>> It was an itch a beaver would have in front of a tree.
Haha, very vivid!

I love the four words Bill picked here. These simple and short words are powerful.

I bet Bill's GRE score was very high too. If the test was simple, how could Bill be set apart and stand out:-)
Rome is not built in one day:)