Unfortunately, our old mnemonic images won’t work here. They worked fine with nouns—exploding dogs and shattering horses make for memorable stories—but those same images break down if you try to use them with verbs or adjectives. How do you attach exploding—to a verb like catch / caught / had caught? Or shattering to tall? Tall shattering isn’t a vivid, memorable story; it’s a bad e. e. cummings poem.
