Word wars

As I walked past the Saturday to-do list, one item caught my eye: "Plant verbs." Plant verbs? How and where? If any verbs are being planted on my property, I'd like to be there to watch. Do they grow from seeds or tubers? What sort of soil? What about fertilizer? Pesticides? I suppose one would want to protect precious verbs from creeping nominalization, but how?

Ah but then I realized I had read the list wrong: "Plant herbs." I'm glad someone is making efforts to add flavor to my life, but surely some nice fresh juicy verbs would do just as well. Of course then we would face the storage problem, particularly if verbs produce as abundantly as, say, zucchini. Our language larder is pretty well full, so adding new verbs to the mix would require some careful pruning of other parts of speech. We could start by tossing out a pile of solecisms and redundancies; simply removing "times" from every instance of "oftentimes" would open up space for thousands of new verbs, and surely no one would notice if we trimmed the "u" out of British spellings of -or words.

But then perhaps our neighbors would notice our bumper crop of new verbs and grow envious--it would be Word War III. They grow bigger verbs, so we plant adverbs; they see our adverbs and add a patch of interjections, and before you know it, the entire county is buried under piles of rotting lingo.

Clearly, whoever made that to-do list must have foreseen the tragic implications and decided to change "verbs" to "herbs." But what's to stop me from changing it back before anyone notices? By this time next week we'd see the first tender green shoots poking out of the ground, a feast for eyes and tongue. Look out, world--here I verb.