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gwkinglast Wednesday at 12:47 AM1 replyview on HN

Interesting that "verb" does not appear in the posted article. I immediately thought of Yegge's kingdom of nouns blog post, which is 20 years old last month! I read it a long time ago and it made an impression on me.

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...


Replies

throw310822last Wednesday at 7:13 AM

I've always thought that it's because the meaning of verbs tends to change a lot depending on the noun they're applied to:

You can get the garbage bag but you can also get a concept

You can carry the garbage out but also carry a burden

You can dump the garbage but also dump someone.

You'd have to define exceptionally accurate verbs and then make sure they have a coherent meaning across all the nouns they are applicable to.