Sunday, October 08, 2006

Be like the squirrel.

I came home late a few days ago and discovered this mysterious bag nearby as I ate a late night snack. I thought it might be a gift for me, but it turns out it is not ours but was used to bring over some food, and is going back. The French "Parlons plus avec le temps" means "Let us speak more with time." Just what you would expect a squirrel to say to you in French. (A lot of furry creatures probably learned French as an evolutionary ploy to compete with French trappers during the settling, or unsettling, of the North American continent.) Earlier, I had been compiling for some as-of-yet-undetermined purpose a mental list of animal words that can also be used as verbs, so I was surprised to see this, since squirrel was on my list. I guess it's not such a strange coincidence. Thinking that someone must have already made a list like this, I did a google search, but I am not turning up anything. Here is a first draft:
Full-fledged verbs: fly, duck, bear, dog, hog, cow, rat, fish, hound, weasel, grouse, snake, bug, kid, badger, goose, seal, buffalo, buck, crow, parrot, swallow, ram, bat, ape, rail, snipe…
Half-assed forms of the verb (2-word verbs requiring a preoposition): horse(around), ferret(out), pig(out), squirrel(away), (out)fox, monkey(around), wolf(down), lion(ize)…
Near-misses and homophones: bull(shit), lion, dove, sow, boar, bee, flea, robin…

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