So many books, so little time!

Three of my books came in at the library: The Summa Teologica of Thomas Aquinas, Harold Bloom's book on the names of God and a Joan Hess mystery. Sunday is supposed to have a high of two degrees, so it will be a good day to stay in and read.

I am waiting on a couple of other things on interlibrary loan.

I wanted to order something on Welsh grammar because I just read that Welsh has words that are verb-nouns. The reference I found says that these are words that are both an action and a thing. The example (I won't bother you with the Welsh) would be something like "He headstands." We would say he does a headstand, where headstand would be a noun. Of course, there are lots of words in English that are used as nouns and verbs (name, jump, hit), but apparently this is not quite the same thing.

I am interested in how this works in Welsh and when, since not all Welsh verbs or nouns are like this. I understand that there is a similar grammatical structure in Chinese, but I'm not even going to think about going there.

It reminds me of an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin talks about how words that start out as nouns become verbs. The example he uses is access. Access used to be a noun -- you gained access to something -- but now it has become a verb -- you access something. Grammar freaks... well, they freak. Anyway, the punch line is "Verbing weirds language."

So true, so true.