I appear to be on the 12 step (verb) program. I’m not sure if I’m on any program at all when it comes to nouns, adverbs and adjectives as I have kept no firm records but for verbs I can report that I am learning an average of 12 a week. Approximately 3 months ago I created flashcards of 250 verbs that looked like they “needed learning,” sort of like the law in Texas that allows one to kill another with no consequence if one could prove that they just “needed killing.” Unfortunately, as the victims of this law never lived to discover, some of those verbs turned out to be totally unjustified as you might only encounter them when reading the memoirs of someone writing back in the 1930s (but were learned nonetheless). Others, it seems, a full 98 of them in fact, did not have a get out of jail free card attached and thus did not get learned (justified or otherwise). And, of course, some of them fall under the special circumstance clause –only if you happen to be reading/discussing/thinking about an academic article within social psychology is it justified for you to know these words.

The sum total is that I have with or without justification killed off 152 of the verbs on my list and those others, well, they are still out there but they should be on notice and quail in fear because … I’m packing a dictionary.