{"id":957,"date":"2017-11-28T22:51:26","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T06:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.obviouseditor.com\/?p=957"},"modified":"2017-11-28T22:51:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T06:51:26","slug":"verb-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/957\/","title":{"rendered":"Verb position"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"quo\">I think the entire country assumed that Mugabe was going to get on state television and announce that he was resigning as president. Instead, he gave a meandering speech that led to no resignation at all. So as far as anyone understands, he is still the president. <span class=\"highlighter\">He&#8217;s the president with diminishing support by the day<\/span>. But until he resigns or until he&#8217;s forced out of power or until the country finds a legal path to dismissing him, he remains the president of Zimbabwe. &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2017\/11\/19\/565211098\/despite-military-pressure-zimbabwe-s-mugabe-refuses-to-step-down\">NPR<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a look at the highlighted sentence, in which &#8216;<span class=\"highlighter\">diminishing<\/span>&#8216; appears to be an adjective.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"reject\">He&#8217;s the president with diminishing support by the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s not meant to be an adjective. Here are the same words, different order.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"suggest\">He&#8217;s the president with support diminishing by the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Without a doubt, &#8216;<span class=\"highlighter\">diminishing<\/span>&#8216; is a verb, an action word. The dude&#8217;s support is shrinking, a little (or a lot) each day. Soon it will be gone. That makes sense. He has been in power since the beginning of (Zimbabwe) time. The following, however, does not make sense.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"reject\">He&#8217;s the president with diminishing support by the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why it is in red.<\/p>\n<p>When a sentence contains two verbs, the second verb should not be a shrinking violet, a wallflower. It should be leaning forward, spring-loaded, ready to pop. <\/p>\n<p><span class=\"suggest\">He&#8217;s the president with support diminishing by the day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I mean, in a dependent clause the verb should follow, not lead, its subject whenever possible. Now that you know this, you have to cringe a little (e.g., at the 1:20 mark here) whenever you hear a verb unwittingly adjectivized.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/player\/embed\/565211098\/565211099\" width=\"100%\" height=\"290\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"NPR embedded audio player\"><\/iframe>    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think the entire country assumed that Mugabe was going to get on state television and announce that he was resigning as president. Instead, he gave a meandering speech that led to no resignation at all. So as far as anyone understands, he is still the president. He&#8217;s the president with diminishing support by the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/957\/\" class=\"more-link\">See entire post<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Verb position&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,57,67,56,62,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/informalenglish.com\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}