verbs

so last week i was accepted as an mit admissions blogger, which is pretty cool! i am somewhat surprised because i think i have a tendency to occasionally write opinions that are unrelatable and blunt or inconsiderate towards people different from me, so i am not sure why admins thought it would be a good idea to give me access to the platform, though i am certainly not complaining. i expect around half of my writing energy (maybe a little less?) to go towards admissions blogging, but everything i write will be cross-posted here so you don’t need to worry about checking the mit website. as you can probably tell i am not in the habit of writing mit-targeted content and the transition might be somewhat awkward for a variety of reasons eg i probably need to start capitalizing letters again. there may also be some redundancy with things i have already written here, especially because the admissions audience is probably not accustomed to the brand of post-rationality x mindfulness x autobiography that i have apparently settled on, so some exposition is probably necessary. so basically please bear with me as i think about how to balance writing demands, and sorry in advance if i end up writing things that annoy you while i figure stuff out

anyway, here is part of my blogger application. the prompt is to write a fake blog post about something you learned recently that you are very excited about

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0. Introduction

There’s a line from The Anthropocene Reviewed which goes like this: “Our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get — six of the seven most common verbs in English  — may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.” When I read this for the first time I thought it was freakishly beautiful but probably an exaggeration of sorts, so I decided to go learn more about verbs, and surely enough, those are the correct verbs, even if verbs two through seven are slightly out of order. 

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2. Have

Upon first glance, have feels like an ugly verb to me. You have a house. I have a family. Have is most often used in ways that remind me of consumerism and waste, possessiveness and dominance, all of which I am averse to. I’m probably a lot more sensitive to these things than most people, because I’m haunted by mental images of landfills and the Great Pacific garbage patch, and because even sentences such as She is my girlfriend make me slightly uncomfortable with the implied ownership of the girl, even when I know that’s not the message actually being communicated. 

There are other uses of have though. In the sentence ‘I have driven to my friend’s house’, have is an auxiliary verb, meaning its only purpose is to support drive, the true action in the sentence. When you say ‘I’ve eaten too much’ or ‘They’ve got a cute cat’, have is hiding in plain sight within the contractions, again with an auxiliary function. And the cool thing is that when have is employed not for ownership but in service of other verbs, just as when objects are acquired not for a desire to possess but to improve peoples’ lives, the ugliness I described earlier disappears. 

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3. Do

Do is a simple verb. Short, straightforward, and to the point, along with its siblings, did and done. I don’t really have any complaints or secrets to reveal about do, and its position as third on the verb list doesn’t surprise me. I do things and usually enjoy them, and I hope you do too 🙂 

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4. Say

Say is the most explicit verb on this list. What I mean is that most verbs here are general enough to be very versatile — do can refer to literally anything, from I do my homework to You did fourteen trips to other galaxies, and I’ve already gone through the many uses of have. On the other hand, say is usually unambiguously about speaking or communicating a statement. 

I’ll be honest with you; when I tried to imagine what I thought the most common English verbs would be, my list looked quite different from this. There were a lot more explicit verbs, like eat and walk, and somehow despite these inclusions I never really thought about say. My thought process was something like, verbs are actions you perform, and most people eat food and go on walks often, so these should be atop the list, right? Of course I was far from the mark; I might eat a few times a day and walk a few dozen times a day, but I probably say a few hundred times a day. The act of saying often goes unnoticed because of how unconscious it is, but say’s rank as fourth on the verb list reflects how saying is everywhere, all the time. 

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5. Go

Go is akin to do in many respects — they are spelled similarly, used similarly in that do is the fundamental unit of execution while go is the fundamental unit of movement, and I don’t have much to say about either. It is worth mentioning, however, that the obvious sibling of go is gone (I go to the store vs I’ve gone to the store), and if you’re wondering why go is fifth on the verb list when go and gone both don’t feel particularly ubiquitous, the answer is that went is technically the other sibling of go. They look different because went comes from some other old English verb wend of the same meaning, whereas go and gone came directly from Germanic, and at some point these verbs were merged into the same family for unclear reasons. 

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6. Get

Get is in many ways the precursor to have. You need to get something before you can have it. In that sense, a lot of the ugliness I mentioned about have applies to get as well, or at least it applies in the scenarios where get is about pursuit and acquisition of an object. 

I’ve been a little unfair to have, though. There are a lot of things you can get and have while steering clear of the desire to possess objects. Ohh, I get it, when you understand the punchline of a joke or a difficult concept from a class. I get the impression you are nervous or I’ve got a bad feeling about this, referring to honest observations about the world. Sometimes I need to remind myself that getting and having are only as ugly as the motives behind them. 

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7. Make

My relationship with make has evolved significantly over the years. When I was younger, make would come up in sentences like I want to make it into MIT or I want to make a lot of money. It’s funny that when I was using the verb make, the meaning I was invoking was actually of the antithetical verb take. Making is about the act of creation, whereas what I really wanted at the time was to take an MIT spot and to take a lot of money for myself. 

These days I think I have a healthier understanding of make. I want to make new friendships and beautiful writing and useful technology. I want to create in places where nothing existed prior, because I’ve realized that making is a much more sustainable use of my energy and attention than taking — making inspires me to be creative and sharpen my skills, while taking mostly leaves me wondering why I don’t have more. And so it brings me satisfaction to see that make is seventh on the verb list, while take is tenth. 

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1. Be

Upon learning that be was atop the list, I was initially very confused. When does anyone ever invoke be? There are usages like You want to be an astronaut and I should be a better person, but these kinds of sentences don’t come up that often, and besides, the primary verbs in those sentences are want and should, not be. Could be really be the most common verb in the English language, when it is almost always an afterthought that stays out of sight? 

Then I realize be has been slipping into everything I write. For example, it appeared three times in the two paragraphs I wrote about say, it appeared again two sentences ago, and its sibling been appeared in the previous sentence. And then I look up the etymology of be, and I see this: 

It turns out that is and are and was and were are all grammatical variants of be, which makes sense in hindsight. Earlier I wrote that go’s position on the verb list is confusing because it includes usage of its sibling went, but the various forms of be blow go out of the water. 

Being is literally inescapable. It pervades every instant of all existence, even if it conceals itself in forms that I am unaware of. When I am not present or running on autopilot or not experiencing the moment, I am still being, though that state of being more closely resembles a passive is than an active be. So in that sense, our usage of be is itself a reflection of the opening quote, “Our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get — six of the seven most common verbs in English  — may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.”. 

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8. Other

The remainder of the list of top 100 English verbs is also interesting to skim. The first 25 verbs are still more or less what you’d expect. Verbs 25-75 start to get into various mundane actions, like turn and hold and spend. Then the last 25 verbs get interesting again; you have remember at 76 and love at 77 and die at 83 and, concerningly, kill at 91. But regardless of what you take away from this ranking, I think it’s kind of beautiful that you can get a sense of what humans tend to think about and value from a simple list of verbs.