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The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.
—Mark Twain, American writer and journalist, Mark Twain's Speeches, 1900

Posted on July 26, 1999 at 9:34 AM

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