X-no-Archive:yes Wirt's post touches the heart of how I feel about this. Languages change. Get over it. I do not study languages (first or second) so that I can complain about how Shakespeare made mistakes. And since the point is to communicate, I mostly only care about style in the most formal of documents, especially those that remove the reader from the writer, so that the reader cannot ask what was intended. While I frequently ask my wife what she means by something she said, I seldom take her to task on some point of grammar, least of all those that seem to be in a state of flux. As a general rule, languages have a very large number nouns, verbs, and words that qualify either or both, and then a smattering of particles that are primarily grammatical, such as pronouns and prepositions (and so few of those that you could quickly name most of them, which is hard to do with nouns, verbs, or their modifiers). Classical Greek did not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, and apparently, English only does so inconsistently. English also has a class or category of words that some grammarians call gerunds, words which are in fact participle forms of verbs, which function syntactically as nouns: "I like eating". The participle eating functions as the direct object of the verb. To complicate matters, once I can use a verb form as a noun, I can use the verb as noun as an adjective, just as I can with a noun: The Galloping Gourmet, or The Running Book, where galloping and running are gerunds functioning as adjectives, much as chemistry can in "the chemistry book". Also note that function-shifted words such as "chemistry" can only modify a very small number of nouns (class, test, teacher, professor, lab), unlike true modifiers, such as "blue". So it should come as no surprise, in a language already full of these "function shifts", with lexemes (forms of words that you can find in any dictionary) that can be nouns or verbs, that we see novel use of one as the other, so that parent is now used as a verb. But opening a paperback dictionary at random, the sixth word on the page is discontent, which can be used as a noun or verb, and apparently has been for more than a little while (if anyone cares to check the OED and let us know the history of its usage). Or, look at how our use of "microwave" has changed from noun and adjective describing radiation to adjective then noun then verb describing an appliance and its use, http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?A2=ind0101C&L=hp3000-l&P=R6464 in the thread, "Our changing language". Now, if you want a truly annoying language behavior, look at slang and jargon, a form of language that essentially marks those who know it as insiders, and excludes everyone else. This madness has afflicted IT for too long. I believe that some of the intention has been good, to generate new terms to avoid confusing those of us with experience from thinking you mean something I already understand, when you think you are talking about something I don't. But the effect is to hinder understanding rather than to facilitate it. And then there are those prone to writing run-on sentences, composed of needlessly complex constructs and dependent clauses. Far worse than incomplete sentences. Greg Stigers http://www.cgiusa.com What's the pleasure of having a pet peeve, if you cannot exercise it? * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *