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I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.

Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like 'friend' is declared not a verb, the problem isn't that it's confusing; it's that the protester finds it deeply annoying.