This discovery made plain
the right and wise course to pursue in order to acquire certainty
and exactness in understanding the statements which the newspaper
was daily endeavoring to convey to me: I must catch a Verb and
tame it. I must find out its ways, I must spot its eccentricities,
I must penetrate its disguises, I must intelligently foresee and
forecast at least the commoner of the dodges it was likely to try
upon a stranger in given circumstances, I must get in on its main
shifts and head them off, I must learn its game and play the limit.
I had noticed, in other foreign languages, that verbs are bred
in families, and that the members of each family have certain features
or resemblances that are common to that family and distinguish it
from the other families--the other kin, the cousins and what not.
I had noticed that this family-mark is not usually the nose or the hair,
so to speak, but the tail--the Termination--and that these tails
are quite definitely differentiated; insomuch that an expert can
tell a Pluperfect from a Subjunctive by its tail as easily and as
certainly as a cowboy can tell a cow from a horse by the like process,
the result of observation and culture. I should explain that I
am speaking of legitimate verbs, those verbs which in the slang
of the grammar are called Regular. There are other--I am not meaning
to conceal this; others called Irregulars, born out of wedlock,
of unknown and uninteresting parentage, and naturally destitute
of family resemblances, as regards to all features, tails included.
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