" Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster now keeps a rare editorial artifact, passed down from editor to editor: the Transitivity Tester. The Transitizer, as some of us call it, is a pink with a sentence on it and a hole cut out where the verb of the sentence is so you can lay the card over your problem verb and read the resulting sentence to see if that verb is, in fact, transitive. The Transitizer reads, "I'ma ___ ya ass." I'ma BEND ya ass (to Webster's will). There you go: this sense of "bend" must be transitive. "
― Kory Stamper , Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries