Saturday, September 20, 2008

active intransitivity

Is it just my brethren (read: holders of an Indian passport or bearers of an Indian PAN card or recipients of a fat monthly income commensurate with their ability to churn out code that make Halahala look like Kwality Ice Cream) or are other people afflicted by the rather curious tendency to confer the status of ambitransitive upon verbs when using them in the present continuous tense. It's either that or an incorrect switch from passive voice to active voice. The do-ee appears to become the doer, but it's only a deception. A grammatical wolf trying to pull the wool over your tired eyes. Consider the line "The page is not displaying" -- my friend, "to display" is a strictly transitive verb; this means that the displayer has to display something. Perhaps you meant to say "The page is not being displayed"; this would mean that you were trying to activate a passive entity, which is something that works in the context of freedom struggles and revolutions but not grammar. Cease and desist otherwise you will be killing.

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