Adjectivisation
|
Towards more picturesque speech™
|
The lexo-crime of taking a perfectly good verb, having it identify as an adjective and then demeaning it by sticking an inferior, dull, verb — like be, make, do, give, or worst of all effect — in front of it. Dead giveaways constructions include the passive and the word of. So, where one on the Clapham omnibus might say,
“Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas.”
An nominaliser might say:
“Last night the shooting was carried out by me, in my pyjamas, of an elephant”
Now we should concede at once that the nominalised version forces on us a more disciplined grammar: it is beyond doubt that it is me, and not the elephant who is wearing my pyjamas. That ruins it as a setup for Groucho Marx’s punchline, of course, and it comes at the expense of energy and elegance. In this case, too, it is punctilliousness not really needed given the context. And if yhou really wanted to be that guy, there is always the stilted, but unambiguous, “last night, in my pyjamas, I shot an elephant.”