Verbs of a feather

Sometimes Science begins with a general observation:

So Struhsaker was inspired to follow a band of vervet monkeys around the Masai-Amboseli game reserve in Kenya, recording their sleeping arrangements at nights, i.e. which monkeys sought out one another's company to sleep on the same branch of that night's nesting tree.

Later researchers treated his observations as similarity data and converted them into abstract maps of vervet monkey social structure.

Vervet Underground

But you try extending this line of field observation to larger balder primates, and are there plaudits from a grateful public? ARE THERE BOGROLL: it is all accusations of "stalking" and "spying", and angry mobs besieging the laboratory. Again. This is very dispiriting and enough to make one reconsider one's career in SCIENCE.

Poole and Rosenthal got away with it by studying congressional voting patterns which are completely different from "who's in bed with whom".

Anyway, here instead are the results of a Riddled Research Laboratory analysis of the social structure of verbs. These are American verbs and we cannot be sure that the 'violence verb' cluster would be as prominent in other dialects.

See how the verbs have arranged themselves into ghettoes of "intransitive movement verbs" and "sensory / somatic function verbs" and so on, for they are happier among their own kind.

Of course there are soft-hearted non-science types who complain that it is "cruel" to keep 36 verbs penned up in a small square enclosure. It's people like that who got all agitated about "Gedanken Rights" and lobbied for legislation and are the reason why we can't conduct Gedanken-experiments any more.

Also if you let verbs out they proliferate in the manner of tribbles.