Grammar Girl here, this week Constance Hale, author of the new writing book, Vex Hex Smash

Smooch, is going to help us live in up our writing with interesting verbs, and also avoid

taking it too far.

Lexicographers don't agree on how many words there are in the English language, but just

pick up an unbridged dictionary and you'll appreciate how weighty our language is.

But a rich vocabulary can be a double-edged sword.

Or should I say a sacks?

The ferocious fighting implement favored by the sacksens.

English is a makeshift, cobbled together thing.

Keltz, Scots, Pits, Romans, Vikings, Engels, Saxons, Danes, and Normans all invaded the

British Isles at various times in the last 1500 years, leaving linguistic traces.

Then, British colonists ventured to distant realms and adopted words from the Americas,

the Orient, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, giving us O. Moccasin, Yen, Bangalow,

and Timbuktu.

All this battling and bending, pushing out and pulling in, give us not just numerous

synonyms, but a nimble language.

We love new words, often inventing them with a band-in.

Shakespeare coined bet, drug, and dwindle.

More recently minted verbs include debone and defrand.

We have the flexibility of turning a noun into a verb, or vice versa.

When the New Yorkers, Roger Angle, needed to describe the motions a catcher makes to

a pitcher during a baseball game, he called that semiforing a plan.

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