# The life-saving power of strong verbs

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Grammar Girl
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM
- **Дата:** 30.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 30:14
- **Просмотры:** 92

## Описание

Can a single word save your life? This week, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Sarah L. Kaufman joins Mignon Fogarty to reveal the hidden psychological power of verbs. We explore why English is a "manner verb" superpower and the surprising reason babies learn prepositions before actions.

In this episode:
🚨 The life-saving verb: How "monster metaphors" in emergency alerts get people to evacuate faster.
🧠 Memory hacking: How the word "smashed" can trick your brain into seeing things that weren't there.
👶 Language secrets: Why Korean babies learn verbs faster than English-speaking babies.
✍️ Stronger writing: How to ditch "fancy" verbs for blunt, powerful action.

Check out Sarah’s books: “Verb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Art of Grace”: https://sarahlkaufman.com/books/

Support Grammar Girl on Patreon:   / grammargirl  

#GrammarGirl #WritingTips #Linguistics #Psychology #verbs 

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

We can go on and on with adverbs, but often they're unnecessary if you find a better verb. Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty and today I am here with Sarah L. Kaufman, author of this fabulous book, Verb Your Enthusiasm. It's an entire book about verbs and it is, I have to tell you, wonderful. I wrote one of the blurbs for the book and I said it was actively useful, a book that makes you want to write and that is absolutely true and I'm so delighted to welcome Sarah to the podcast. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you, Mignon. So glad to be here. Yeah, well, thank you for writing this wonderful book. So, one of the first things that popped into my mind is was it intimidating to write a book about verbs? You know, in some ways it was. The overall experience was it was just tremendous fun because I loved going through literature to find great examples. That was just a joy. I loved talking to linguists and social scientists, cognitive scientists about the effects of verbs on our bodies, about the origins of verbs and who pushes new language forms forward, you know, and where verbs come from. All that was absolutely fascinating to me and you know, so many people were just extremely generous with their time. I have a background not only as a writer and a journalist and arts critic. My specialty was dance, but also as a copy editor, which is how I started in journalism. So, I've always had an interest in grammar and editing. But I did have a lot of, you know, questions and some qualms about holy, you know, mackerel, I do not want to like get the grammar wrong in this book about grammar, which is somewhat about grammar. — But there again, I relied on so many editing and writing friends of mine throughout the journalism world, copy editors and other grammarians and just learned a lot myself. I think that was really the grand pleasure of this book was how much I learned about verbs and about our language. So, I'm curious if your first draft, if you went over the top and it was filled with just like dynamic, big, fancy verbs the whole thing or if you if you felt self-conscious about every verb you included in the book. Well, that was definitely something I combed through afterwards and tried to make sure that having written a whole chapter on the you know, why the passive voice is problematic in so many instances, I wanted to make sure I was not, you know, that I was following my own advice. So, that was definitely kind of a fun part of the editing process actually and at one point in the book I do take readers through my own crazy obsessiveness over finding the right verb for just a very basic sentence and knowing that I am, you know, putting forward a lot of advice and suggestions that I wanted to make sure I made a good choice myself and that every verb I was grabbing for just sounded weird and awkward and then finally I got like the you know, the logical choice was sort of staring me right in the face. Do you remember what that sentence was? It was like early in the book where I said something like throughout my journalism career I have something on verbs, you know, and what I ended up saying is I have relied on the power of verbs, okay? I can't remember whatever convoluted word I came up with at first. As I was reading it over I was like, "Yikes, you know, fancy verb alert. " Because the fancy verbs are the ones that I have the strongest advice for readers to avoid. You know, the fancy verbs are kind of the pretentious ones, the ones that just sound a little awkward but puffed up like utilize and exude. You know, the people don't really say in conversation and they have a lot of extra syllables and we have perfectly good short, blunt verbs that, you know, use or you know, anything else besides exude. I mean, exude just kind of brings to mind goopy, oozing, you know. — Um, but anyway, blunt, simple words like rely, you know, I have relied on verbs throughout my career. Gets right to the point. — one thing that was just fabulous about

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

the book is all the examples. I found them just inspiring and instructive. Throughout your whole life have you been saving these wonderful examples as you come across them or did you spend like a year going through books looking for them while you were writing? Well, I started working on this book during our wonderful year of COVID lockdowns. So, — where I think a lot of people started writing books. Yeah, so I did go through a lot of literature and that was really fun. But you know, um, I mean, I guess the origin story of this book comes from a couple of different events. One is that as a dance critic, which I was for 27 years at the Washington Post I wrote about a niche art form but a very exciting art form and I wanted to reach a broad audience. So, I decided to focus on how it felt and how it what it looked like to be in the theater with these marvelous dancers. You know, what was the visceral experience? And in doing that I, you know, I had to write about action. I mean, dance is all action. And editors and writers, you know, I I heard some comments over the years about like, "Hey, Sarah, you use verbs really well. " Which was kind of cool, kind of fun and I thought, "Yeah, that makes sense because it's part of my goal, right? " Was to share this excitement of the art form that I was writing about. So, that was part of it, but then the other part when I started teaching, which I've done for a number of years, teaching writing. I found that students would just often get kind of like verbs would kind of trip them up, you know, either they would use fancy verbs because you know, that's sort of sound sophisticated to use sort of these big, multi-syllabic verb constructions, or they would use dull verbs and that leads to dull writing. And so, I guess putting those two things together is what led me to write the book. So, I can't say that I spent my life, you know, sort of making a list of great verbs, but it was it they rose up in my career kind of in an organic way all throughout, you know, my teaching and my writing. Yeah. Yeah, well, they just they add so much to the it's like you have the perfect example for every point you're trying to make. It's just wonderful. You know, you're talking about your students and jump ahead a bit in my notes. One of the things that really shocked me is that babies learn prepositions before they learn verbs. And I think, you know, babies they are they are action incarnate and yet they learn verbs later. Like, why is that? That was really interesting. Um, that's in English speaking babies in particular learn verbs last. It's kind of the last part of speech that they add to their vocabularies. So, around a year or so, around the first birthday, babies might speak a noun or two and then they, you know, will slowly accumulate more nouns, slowly or rapidly as the case may be, accumulate more nouns, some prepositions, you know, whether it's mama, cat, dog, cup and then on, off, of course, no, you know, interjections interjections. Um, but verbs come last and usually not until a child is approaching the second birthday. And um, I talked about this with a linguist who is of Korean origin and she has studied how babies who are from English speaking families versus babies from Korean speaking families learn verbs differently. And one reason that Korean children tend to learn verbs faster and earlier in life is because in Korean the verb comes at the end of the sentence. So, it's called a verb final language. So, instead of saying I eat an apple, in Korean the construction would be I apple eat. And that final word of the sentence is more memorable. It's we remember it more because it's the last thing we heard. So, that's one theory. But, another one is the way that

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

English-speaking parents teach their children words versus the way Korean-speaking parents teach their children. And she did this interesting experiment with a book about an elephant, a picture book, that she had English-speaking parents and Korean-speaking parents show their children. So, and then she would, you know, study she would observe how they spoke. And so, the English-speaking parents would say, "Oh, look. What is that? It's an elephant. " So, they're naming the noun. And the Korean-speaking parents would say, "What is he doing? What is the elephant doing? " "Oh, he's jumping. " So, they would name the action. And um you know, why? I mean she didn't really have, you know, it this is like probably fruit for further studies. But, and Korean has a lot of words for um how things fit in different containers, different shapes. Like you know, it's so interesting to look at languages and what their specialties are. Like where they have an expanded vocabulary in one area or another. But, I just thought it was fascinating that um children can learn actions, can learn um events and the process of change. They can learn that faster, but it's just a question of the model that they're following. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And you said that um English has, I think, more verbs of manner than most languages. What does that mean? Yeah, that was also an interesting discovery that was quite a surprise to me. It's like the hidden superpower of the English language is that the English language possesses just a magnitude of many times more verbs of manner than a lot of other languages. So, linguists um can categorize verbs in various different ways. I kind of simplified it in the book to stative verbs, basic verbs, and verbs of manner. And stative verbs are verbs that describe a state of being. You know, be, understand, know, believe, appear. Basic verbs are the are like the neutral, the most neutral ordinary action. Walk, run, sit, eat. And then verbs of manner, that's where the fun comes in, right? That's like wiggle, wander, zoom, zigzag, stumble, crash, you know, gobble. Those are all the verbs that are much more descriptive, that tell us the manner in which an action is happening. in a lot of languages like French and Spanish, there may be only a dozen or a couple dozen, a few dozen verbs of manner. Like for the verb jump, there's one way to say jump in French, Spanish. There's half a dozen or more ways to say jump in English. You can say bounce, bound, leap, uh boing, you know, you can come up with more. You can even invent more, which is also a fun feature of our language is that it is elastic enough, it allows for inventing um words. And in other languages, um so as I said, in many languages, there's a fewer number of these verbs of manner like bounce and soar and leap. English has many hundreds. And um that gives writers enormous flexibility and and possibilities for describing, for suggesting, for bringing images to mind, for lighting up subtle feelings inside the reader, for triggering responses and emotions. Because we can describe so much so fast and efficiently with just a verb. And it's probably why we may maybe don't maybe we don't need as many adverbs because our language is this way. You know, you talk about you know, I think that you and I probably both agree that the advice to like get rid of all adverbs is over the top. But, you know, you can often pair back pair down your adverbs. And when you choose a better verb, but you talked about some instances where adverbs are still good. So, maybe talk

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

about the in English in particular the way we combine adverbs with verbs and how we can do it in like particularly good ways. Right. I'm glad you brought that up because that is part of writing you know, effective writing with verbs. I was about to say effectively, writing effectively. Ooh, adverb alert. The thing is that um sometimes, you know, and in especially in uh you know, spoken English, I mean we're you know, we speak the way we speak and adverbs add a lot of rhythm and uh fill in gaps when maybe we're we're trying to think of the right word. But, in written form, you know, when we're writing, we're trying to, you know, craft something powerful and dramatic or just effective, just to get the message across, adverbs do clutter up. They are generally more than two syllables. They got that l y ending, slowly, quickly. And often, you know, ra- repsodically. I mean, you can go on and on with adverbs. But, often they're unnecessary if you find a better verb. So, instead of, you know, he walked in clumsily on his crutches, you could say he stumbled in on his crutches, right? You don't need the clumsily if you find something better and more descriptive than walk. So, a verb the verb stumble, you know, fills in for walk clumsily. And there're just many, many instances of that where it delivers a better picture. And it also underscores the um the advice that many, many writers give and live by, which is showing versus telling. You know, it's better to show than to tell. So, you can show an action more quickly with just a verb that captures it versus telling with adverbs that give the manner in which something was done. But, then we can sometimes find that manner verb, that verb of manner that will do it all in one word. It was interesting how you talked about using dynamic action verbs even for describing internal thought processes. Um feelings and emotions. Um you can still use the good verbs. Exactly. And you know, one of the examples I use is um from Virginia Woolf, who was, you know, such an amazing writer and a pioneer of interiority, which is, you know, kind of what a lot of novels are working with. Now, a lot of new novels are coming out with, you know, just beautiful examples of the of interiority and interior events happening. And yet, this can also be a landscape for dynamic change and process and action that can really come to life vividly with verbs. So, um just uh suggesting, you know, some instead of naming emotions, you know, uh she felt nervous and anxious. So, but she wanted to hide her feelings. So, she tried not to look that way. You know, that's kind of a clumsy, long-winded way of expressing something, but you can still access that interiority by using more vivid more vivid verbs to show the nervousness. So, um you know, her heart raced and hot fear spread down her chest and, you know, tangled up her insides. But, to hide her feelings, she steeled her spine and lifted her chin. You know, you can show these actions that don't name the emotions. They leave it up to the reader to fill in, which is so lovely, right? We like to be able to bring our own experiences to what we read. And um so, we can fill it in and those actions suggest what's happening in a visceral way. And they bring the interior processes from the page right into our own bodies because we can identify with those actions that we've often felt ourselves. Right. And it's just fascinating how the exact verb

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

you choose can change how the reader or the listener perceives what has been communicated. You talked about a study where I think it was smashed versus hit changed the whole perception. So that was a really interesting study done by Elizabeth Loftus Loftus, excuse me, who is a psychology professor at the University of California. And she studies memory and how words can change memories, how memories change over time and one of the ways is through the suggestive power of verbs, which she captured in this experiment where a group of participants watched police videos of a car accident. And one this you know, the first group was asked what how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? And another group, the second group was asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? So the first group came up with an estimated mile per hour speed that was five or 10 miles slower than the group that heard the question as how fast were they going when they smashed into each other. So the only words that were different were the verbs or the verb phrase smashed into. But it affected how these witnesses watching the same video remembered what they had just seen. And indeed there were other parts of the experiment where when reading smash also affected how much broken glass they saw, you know, whether they even saw broken glass or not. Whether it was in the video or not, when they heard the question how fast were they going when they smashed into each other there was an assumption that there was broken glass all over. Wow. — So there are just I made so many interesting discoveries through talking with some of these cognitive scientists about these kinds of experiments on how language can change the way we perceive things. Yeah, and that's what I mean the book it made me want to go back into my writing and look at the verbs I had used and think about how they might influence how people were perceiving what I was saying. It was just fascinating. What are some other examples where the very specific word choices can influence perception? So another linguist that I spoke with, she's a linguist and cognitive scientist has studied how language affects people's tendency to evacuate from a natural disaster either quickly or slowly or to have more questions or to you know, react immediately and how the wording of government warnings can affect this response time. And what she found was that warnings that came out say for a wildfire, if they expressed the wildfire in very dynamic, vigorous ways like a monster, using monster metaphors and monster actions people responded much more quickly. So if if a warning came out saying a fire is building and you need to leave quickly okay, that's one way to do a warning. Another way, which would produce a much more quick response was the fire is devouring acres of land, you know, it's raging across the landscape and that would you know, get people to move much more quickly. And these sound like very obvious examples, but in a disaster situation when you're hearing warnings coming across you know, the airwaves or seeing them on your phone you have so many questions, right? There's so much stress, you know, what's my responsibility? What do I do? What do I tell my neighbors? How do I gather my family and my pets and what do I bring? And so to have a very quick and effective message is important in terms of motivating people in the right direction, right? So saying something is raging, rampaging, tearing through that is a way to get people moving. And another way that we see that is in the headlines. So with again with wildfires, you know, the headlines are often written to connect

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

them with monsters and monster actions, devouring raging, tearing through and this gets people's attention. Yeah, if you're a news writer at TV or radio or print writer, the verbs you choose could save lives. There you go. It's important. It gets the message, you know, gets the news delivered. And um yeah, journalists and writers can take a lot of I think lessons from this that you know, the idea of verbs is not just that they are necessary parts of speech and they you know, connect the subject with the object, that they show an action but that they can have effects on our bodies, on our minds. They can you know, awaken little responses inside. They can transmit a lot of emotion and they can just make the writing much more dynamic. So as a matter of style verbs are extremely important and I felt like it was a kind of underrated, you know, phenomenon that you don't really hear too much about the power of verbs in writing. You know, a lot of my students for example would say, "I usually like really struggle over the adjectives but not so much you know, I don't think about verbs, you know? " And it's like the description is always fun, you know, fun for a lot of writers, students to get into and that may involve more nouns and adjectives but you can also make your writing just streamlined and super effective by focusing on the verbs. Yeah, and I think the other thing that surprised me, the final thing I want to talk about is verb tense because I think people don't think about verb tense hardly at all. The only questions I ever get about it are from people who are learning English as a second language. But I mean I was surprised to see that the verb tense you use to describe something again can change how people perceive the action actually happened. Exactly. And this was came from another study that where I spoke to the scientist who led the study. It was about in terms of saying something happened in the past like you know Joe painted a lot of houses last summer versus Joe was painting can affect how many houses, you know, how much work we assume that he was doing. So was painting gives a sense of the action extending into time and thus you know, accomplishing more. Whereas um in an example from you know, politics, the candidate was accused of taking bribes last summer versus the candidate had been accused of taking bribes last summer. You know, it just gives like different subtle senses of did the action start and then stop and is it over with? You know, is it kind of ongoing? Is there like a fuzzy ending? And these are also things to be aware of as we're writing because they may seem to convey the same thing that something took place in the past but what how do we define that past? You know, even in a subtle way. What are the nuances there in the verb tense? Yeah, well it's really it's just it's amazing. It really drives home how much verbs matter. I have to say I've read the book twice now already. I read it you know, a while ago when I wrote the blurb and then I read it again to prepare for the interview and I don't reread books ever, but this is one that I could imagine rereading every year or two just for inspiration and to keep my mind focused on how much verbs matter. It really was that excellent of a book. And I can see why you know, Sarah is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for her work as a dance critic at the Washington Post and in the bonus segment we're going to talk about that work and how it informed her writing of this book and another book that she's written called the art of grace on moving well through life. We'll talk about how the verbs mattered in that and what how you can gracefully use your verbs and then we will get her book recommendations. So, Sarah, thank you again so much for being here. Thank you, Mignon. I really appreciate it and it's been so much fun.

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gcLfUcJRM&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 30:00)

You bet. And where can people find you if they want to, you know, connect with you online? So, my website is sarahlkaufman. com. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/48519*