Tuesday, August 08, 2006

 

Renaming the Passive Voice

The blog languagehat is sponsoring a contest to rename the unjustly maligned passive voice. With tongue in cheek I suggest the pathic voice, because Greek παθικός (pathikós) is the equivalent of Latin passivus. English pathic means "passive, suffering" as an adjective and "the passive partner in a homosexual act" as a noun. Another grammatical term with a double meaning is the verb conjugate, meaning not only "to inflect a verb" but also "to have sexual relations."



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