My first reaction, given that Iran and the US are currently negotiating, was that Iran had effectively destroyed an American draft proposal by disagreeing with or insisting on the removal of more than half of the wording, to much the same effect as when a cook guts a fish.
Why is the grammatical category of "voice" so named?
Good question. I wondered about that, too, and figured it was Latin -- vox, vocis, after all -- so I checked Donatus. But he doesn't use the term at all, and doesn't even group active and passive in a separate category; they're called 'types of verbs' (genera verborum -- given the definitions, this seems to be like what we would now call "verb forms"). Passive and Active verbs are identified only by their endings, not by their uses or meanings, and they're classed with deponent and semideponent verbs, also by types of endings. So that's a dead end. Grammatical "voice" is not a Latin term.
The OED's first examples of the grammatical sense of voice in English are remarkably recent:
- 1382 Wyclif Prol. 57 A participle of a present tens, either preterit, of actif vois, eithir passif.
- 1591 Percival Span. Dict. C 2 By changing e of the future of the Indicatiue into ia, you make the third voice of the preterimperfect tense of the Subiunctiue.
(the OED adds that it was "used instead of 'person'" here; i.e, it's a typo)
- 1612 Brinsley Pos. Parts (1615) 20 b, Giue the terminations of the first Persons of the Actiue voice alone.
These appear to be discussing Latin grammar. Looking at related languages, German just says im Passiv, but French and Spanish both use reflexes of Latin vox.
So somewhere along the line, the term 'voice' got picked up and stuck with this meaning. Probly nobody had any use for the term any more, what with all this newfangled printing and reformation and renaissance and all that stuff going on.
English, of course, doesn't have any grammatical Voice; there's a Passive construction (transformation, rule), and a Middle alternation (which, incidentally, is what's going on with The book is selling well), but no Active construction, rule, transformation, or alternation. Or voice.
This is just linguistic terminology, used conservatively. I'm not a conservative person, but I use grammatical terms conservatively because when they're used liberally, they tend to smear across every topic we can possibly associate with language, which is pretty much everything.
Best Answer
The phrase the globe over is merely an inversion of an adjectival prepositional phrase over the globe modifying women. The sense is over the [entire] globe.
Cherry-pick is a standard idiomatic verb phrase meaning
Cherry-picked is the past participle used as an adjective here.