In an earlier post I talked about an exercise in using nouns and verbs. Sometimes when I do this exercise, I choose 10 or 20 verbs and nouns, and make 10 or 20 sentences. But sometimes I get stuck on just one noun and verb, and find myself writing on and on. Here’s an example of this.  The noun I picked out was “crow” and out of the verb pile I picked the word “disgust.”

Well, my first reaction was disgust – at myself. Why did I put a transitive verb like disgust in the action verb pile? You can’t use the word disgust as an action verb – “The crow disgusts himself” was the only one I could come up with, and that gives no picture at all of what the crow is actually doing. To understand disgust, one must use action verbs. “The crow sneered at the hawk flying overhead” – I’m not sure how a crow sneers, but at least it’s an action verb that indicates disgust. Or “The crow gagged on the rotten peanut” shows disgust, and I’d kind of like to see a crow gagging, I wonder what sound they make if they do. Or “The crow flipped his right feather at the hawk” or “The crow pointed his middle claw at the hawk” – now these are action verbs showing the anthropomorphic crow being disgusted – or perhaps just pissed off. “The crow dropped the empty peanut shell on the ground, and flew back to his perch in the fir tree, where he cawed loudly so all the other crows in the vicinity heard what a lousy trick some human had played on him.” A bit long, but again one can see that the crow is disgusted.

I did make a mistake by putting “disgust” into the action verb pile, but on the other hand, I had a lot of fun writing about that disgusted crow.

Technorati Tags: verbs, nouns, transitive verbs, disgust, crows