We’re also not fazed by them when buttering our bread, lacing our shoes, elbowing our way out of a crowd or petitioning the president to stop bombing villages. Some people are only happy with denominal verbs when it rains. We shouldn’t write them all off just yet. While some examples might be questionable, denominal verbs can also be useful. But before you join them and “ out-Herod Herod” over denominal verbs, know that Shakespeare was also quite the inveterate verber-one among many-because nouns have been verbing their way all over the English language for quite some time. Benjamin Franklin preferred to call it “awkward and abominable.” (And many modern language pundits apparently are still fighting the good fight on his behalf). Some call it “verbing,” which sounds like a new dance craze, while linguistic nerds call it denominalization. The conversion of nouns into verbs is not actually a new phenomenon. Shakespeare was quite the inveterate verber. 1600) how we speak now? Can we just boycott (thanks, Captain Charles Boycott) them and Houdini our way out of this mess? that mean the same thing? Is the jargon-riddled business world impacting (first used as a verb c.
(No really, please take them away.) It’s easy to see why these awkward constructions might elicit, as Fowler put it, “cries of anguish.” Why use these nouns as verbs at all when there are already perfectly good verbs like talk, act, etc. Take examples like dialoguing, actioning, efforting, or transiting.
The dicey practice of turning a noun into a verb has long been a square on the language pedant’s bingo game. So is this a playful new linguistic construction or is it time to roll our eyes at the internet, again?
Ah, the topsy-turvy world of language innovation, where the lion lies down with the lamb, nouns suddenly become verbs, and “ verbing weirds language.” Consider popular internet memes like “ Let me librarian that for you” and “Do you even science, bro?” in which “librarian” and “science” are nouns weirdly disguised as verbs.
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