People who love words—crossword solvers, anagram lovers, Scrabble players—love nouns and adjectives. But people who love sentences love verbs. Nouns, because they name something permanent, have just one form. Of all parts of speech they are the most self-sufficient and singularly resonant. But verbs take many forms, often irregular, depending on what role they play in the sentence. They are useless by themselves, and rarely as euphonious as nouns or adjectives. But put
