As Sarah Palin attested recently, never misunderestimate that English is a living language. So, when someone transformationed nouns into verbs, all you refudiators better just got to celebrate it!
What do these words and phrases have in common? Friend, Google, TiVo, log in, contact, barbecue, unlike, concept, text, Photoshop, leverage, party, Xerox, reference, architect, parent, improv, transition, diligence, host, chair, gift, heart, impact?
They’ve all been declared--by someone, somewhere, whether a usage expert or just a self-appointed language cop--”not verbs.” It doesn’t matter whether they’re useful, interesting, or entertaining as verbs; to many people, if a word began its life as a noun, then ”verbing” it (like I did there) is just wrong.
Erin McKean articled this interesting observation (and protest) about verbing: Link
Oh, and if you're not up to the whole #Shakespalin thing, here's a primer at HuffPo.
This has been the case ever since the American Revolution, when the founders decided that English shouldn't be aristocratic but rather populist, making spellings easier in the process.
Words no longer need to be officially 'coined' in order to be added to the language. If people are using a word, and it makes sense (i.e. people understand the meaning it attempts to convey), it's a word.
Thus all of those are valid verbs. Look at the list, some of them are way more everyday than others. Try to tell the modern English speaker that 'contact' or 'host' aren't verbs. That's ridiculous.
Sometimes I ask my friend what we want to food for lunch. When it's late at night, I'll go bedding (instead of going to bed).
I won't take it seriously, and I won't even try to defend my use for them, and all the language police can still keep their virtues and sanity or whatever. If anything, I'm "verbing" probably because I like to mock the trend.
"Verbing weirds language."
And what is wrong with words like hosting, impacting, or referencing? And who uses the word referencing the most? The academic community. I guess they're all wrong then?
It reminds me of when my kids were little, and giving each of the vulcan neck pinch from star trek was known as "spocking" each other.
my favorite politician word blunder this year is obama's ''corpseman'' instead of corpsman.
did you use that as to link in to some post about language at the time?
don't remember anything...
wonder why.
They all mangle language regardless of party. After World War I, Warren G Harding called for a return to "Normalcy."
President Eisenhower was the first president to pronounce nuclear as "Nook-U-Lar."
George W Bush had so many that someone couned the term "Bushisms."
The point of this whole deal was, and is: instead of quietly correcting her error, she began to liken herself to Shakespeare. The hubris reflected by that act is the real issue.
Which English? That one or that one? Or were you referring to this English or... maybe her English or his English... the Queen's English? ...spherical English, like at a pool table, right?
STOP USING THE WORD 'THAT' WHERE IT ISN'T NEEDED.
Why trailer a boat when you could tow it? Why colorize a movie when you could just color it? It's cute when children do it, but in adults this just indicates a small vocabulary.
The cartoon where Calvin says, "verbing weirds language", is here.
Shakespeare was Shakespeare and Palin is Palin. New words begin with a first use and verbing is one mechanism for their creation. Not every mumbled utterance becomes a neologism, however, there is a certain amount of natural selection as the new word is either adopted or rejected by the public. Given the extreme reaction of self-proclaimed grammar and vocabulary police this probably takes longer now than in Shakespeare's time.
Besides, sometime the new word is perfectly cromulent and in some cases serves to embiggen the creator.
I HATE the word "guesstimate". I have never seen a word make educated people look stupid quicker. My reasoning here is that there is a limit to how much you can guess. You either know a base concept or you don't. If you "partially understand" the concept then you're pulling too many things into the concept. I'm referring to elementary concepts here. So, when guessing, you are effectively admitting to lacking appropriate understanding and simply trying to answer anyway. It is the same with estimating. There is a limit to how much one can guess or estimate. So there is nothing to be gained from the word "guesstimate" as it doesn't put any extra emphasis on the idea. It's simply another synonym that makes it all that much more confusing.
Ginormous, on the other hand, is different in terms of limits. There doesn't seem to be a limit to how large things can get. So if we take "gigantic" and "enormous" and combine them, it must be assumed that the object is far larger than gigantic or enormous would normally describe. This is possible because there's no known (reasonable) limit for the size of objects.
So, what about verbing? I think verbing is acceptable when there simply isn't a word to convey the subtle meaning one is attempting to carry out. But when a word is verbed because nerdism gets in the way, it's intolerable. Language may be free and fluid but it should ALSO be efficient.
I also hate that "verbed" is a verbism (new word referring to words that were verbed).
Hubris? lol