“D/ed” Flies

This Friday’s feature is my bon voyage post — many of you readers may recall a comment I made in the email subscription, or in our Facebook group for The Centrifugal Eye, about taking a trip in October that was being rescheduled for November. I’m all set to go now, heading out next week. So, this will be my last blogpost for a month, as the original 2-week visit has been renegotiated to nearly 4 weeks.

We’ll call this interlude a holiday vacation . . . a “mid-season break,” the same as many of today’s television show series call their episode interruptions.

"Packed Suitcase" - WIX Stock Photo

If I get any personal writing done during that time, I’ll be happy, but I’m also going to give myself permission to relax and regroup my scattered energies after harvest season has petered out. I bet many of you will be busy with your own holiday activities around the same time, so you likely won’t miss my weekly counsel for a while.

In parting, I’d like to leave you with the fix-it for the oft-confused tense to use when transforming a verb into an adjective. Lots of writers do it, and it amazes me how often they get it wrong. Recognize what I’m talking about?

Here are examples for the 2 most misused verbs-changed-to-adjectives you’ll run across:

“(To) damn” becomes “damned,” as in, “That damned bike wheel keeps falling off.” It is not a “damn bike wheel.”

“(To) fashion becomes “fashioned,” as in, “What an old-fashioned dress she has on.” It is not an “old fashion dress.”

If the modifier/qualifier/adjective you want to use has a verb form, you should change it to past tense. Then the verb becomes recognizable as a descriptive adjective.

It’s the same past-tense rule as when you take a measured classification, such as size and age, and change it into an adjective.

Despite advertising’s attempts to throw us all off, the bed should be king-sized, not king-size. They are bite-sized brownies, not bite-size.

Books and other forms of media often come in boxed sets, not box sets.

Oh, and there’s the constant ongoing arguments about using “teenage” as an adjective instead of teen-aged. But I’ve gone on long enough. Those poor D/EDs dropping like flies. Won’t you do your best to keep them alive?

See you mid-December!

#verbtenses #timeoff #seasonal #waystoimprovewriting #adjectives