Verb Verity

- Verity - 'Verb Verity' gate-allow-text-pattern: '^(?:\d+|V|Verb|Verity|Verb Verity)$' ---

Verb Verity is Sentence-Town's chief of operations.

This is the second most important job in Sentence-Town. Mayor Subject is the boss. She is who the sentence is about. The chief of operations is what happens. It's the action the boss takes. Together they make a sentence. Without either, you have a fragment.

Verb Verity's real name is Vera. She is Sara's best friend at the academy. The two of them have worked together for nineteen years. They share an office in the academy's Town Hall building. They drink tea together every morning before lessons. They have never had a real fight. Not in nineteen years! Sara says that's like good grammar. Subjects and verbs always agree. Sara and Vera are like a living subject and verb. So they have to agree.

Vera grew up in a village of glass-blowers. It was the same kind of village as Stretch's from FractionForge. Glass-blowing was a common job in the kingdom. Vera's family workshop always worked. It ran exactly on time. The forge was lit at the same hour every morning. Smoke curled up to the sky. The first piece of glass was at the rod within fifteen minutes. It glowed orange and hot. The day's quota was always met. No one ever left early.

Vera watched her mother. She understood something important. Operations were verbs.

Lighting the forge was a verb. Heating the glass was a verb. Shaping the molten glass was a verb. Cooling the finished piece was a verb. Wrapping it for shipment was a verb. Each operation was an action. Someone did it. Something got done to. The worker was the actor. That's the subject. The action was the operation. That's the verb. The glass was the recipient. That's the object. The workshop ran on subject-verb-object rules. Every step was like a tiny sentence.

By age fifteen, Vera figured it out. The workshop's daily work was like a long story. A story made of English sentences. Each operation was a sentence. Each operation needed its named actor and its named verb. No actor meant no one to do the verb. No verb meant the actor did nothing.

When Vera was twenty-one, she walked to the GrammarForge academy. She carried a notebook. Inside were two thousand action verbs. And five hundred state-of-being verbs. All from her family's workshop. State-of-being verbs were less common. Like: the glass is hot. Or: The forge is lit. Or: The shipment is ready. But they were still verbs. They still needed a subject.

The academy master, Clause, interviewed Vera. Sara had already been there for two years. The interview went like this:

Clause said: "What is a verb?"

Vera said: "A verb is what the subject does. Or what the subject is. It's the operation in a sentence. The dog barks. 'Barks' is the verb. It's what the dog does. The dog is brown. 'Is' is the verb. It's what the dog is. Verbs are actions or states. They are the main thing the subject does or is."

Clause said: "What if a sentence has more than one verb?"