When we pass beyond the matter of broad categorization to look at the verb’s possibilities, we find the greatest need of instruction to lie in the verb epithet. It may be needless to impress any literate person with the verb’s relative importance, but it is necessary to point out, even to some practiced writers, that the verb itself can modify the action it asserts, or, so to put it, can carry its own epithet. Looking at the copious supply of verbs in English, we often find it possible to choose one so selective in meaning that no adverb is needed to accompany it. If we wish to assert that “the man moves _quickly_,” we can say, depending on the tone of our passage and the general signification, that he hastens, _rushes_, _flies_, _scrambles_, _speeds_, _tears_, _races_, _bolts_, to name only a few. If we wish to assert that a man is not telling the truth, we have the choice of _lies_, _prevaricates_, _falsifies_, _distorts_, _exaggerates_, and some others. As this may seem to treat the matter at too didactic a level, let us generalize by saying that there is such a thing as the characterizing verb, and that there is no telling how many words could have been saved, how many passages could have dispensed with a lumbering and perhaps inaccurate adverb, if this simple truth about the verb were better appreciated. The best writers of description and narration know it. Mark Twain’s most vivid passages are created largely through a frequent and perceptive use of the verb epithet. Turn to almost any page of _Life on the Mississippi_: Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy, for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.[127] Here there occurs not just action, but expressive action, to which something is contributed by Twain’s subtle appreciation of modal variations in the verb.