An editing colleague put me on to Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s quirky book years ago, and I often dip into it. Grammar with drama and a touch of goth…
The verb is the heartthrob of a sentence. Without a verb, a subject would be abandoned, stranded in a sentence, incapable of sensing the void. There would be nothing between words but meaningless space or a clutter of adjectives, phrases, and pronouns, and maybe something to eat, but no way to reach for it or bite it, since action and feeling are missing.
—Karen Elizabeth Gordon. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: the ultimate handbook of grammar for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed
looking up/looking down 