Lauren Beukes’s novel Broken Monsters has a short passage on business jargon and young people’s attitudes to it. Layla, a character in her mid-teens, is visiting her friend Cas and introduces Cas’s father:
Her dad is a tech-preneur. Name a major company in Silicon Valley and he’s ‘pulled a stint there’ – his words. It’s why they moved from Oakland, California. Detroit is friendlier to start-ups: lower overheads, tax incentives, hungry talent, cheap office space in TechTown. He’s bought into the city’s revitalization ‘with bells on’. Layla loves hearing him talk. It’s another language, where any word can be verbed. She and Cas have a secret drinking game they play during dinner, taking a sip of juice every time he uses techno jargon like ‘angel-investor’.
‘How’s Crater going?’ Layla asks him, trying to remember the name of his big start-up project.
‘Curatr,’ he corrects her automatically, rolling the trrrr.
Some examples certainly qualify as tech jargon or terminology: the portmanteau tech-preneur and the fictional brand Curatr, with its fashionably dropped vowel (cf. Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr, Qzzr). TechTown, meanwhile, is a real-life hub for entrepreneurship in Detroit, notable in this context for its CamelCase style.
Other examples cited – pulled a stint, with bells on, angel investor – are not what I’d consider tech jargon, but the passage is from Layla’s pov, so I figure it’s more that she has only heard these phrases from Cas’s dad and associates them with his industry.
Her observation about verbing applies to English more generally.
But I suppose the point is that tech execs (and managers, advertisers, etc.) are more likely to do it with abandon, and that when you’re a teenager and it’s your dad or your friend’s dad, it can be a particular source of interest, embarrassment, or entertainment.
It’s refreshing to see this form of language, so often maligned, portrayed positively. I’m reminded of a cartoon by Dana Fradon included in The New Yorker Cartoon Album 1975–1985:
[Caption: “You’re a good man, Washbourne. I like the way you use nouns as verbs.”]
Novel verbing can lend oomph to mundane moments. Here is George Pelecanos describing a car being started in Drama City:
Miller ignitioned the 330i and drove north
It can make a description concise and precise: Jenny Diski, in Stranger on a Train, revives an obscure old verb from maths:
The train traveller pores over the timetable and arithmetises away
Introducing a quiz on nouning and verbing that I made for Macmillan Dictionary, I wrote that ‘pretty much anything can be verbed, as competent writers well know’. That post features verbings of seems by Jack Schaefer and shall I by A.M. Homes.
But really this is something many of us do all the time as we express ourselves:
What have you verbed lately?
I translated a book recently and – only barely – resisted the temptation to signal my contribution with an “Englished by JB.”
Very nice. English as a verb has a long and illustrious history, too, used in various senses (some of them to do with translation) by the likes of Milton, Thomas More, Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson.
Haha, I love this!
You are inspiring me to work on this skill!
Happy upskilling! Your comment made me wonder about plain skill as a verb: it turns out ‘to skill of’ or ‘to skill in’ something used to mean to have knowledge of or skill in it. The usage is long obsolete, according to the OED.
I have a nagging memory that I’ve verbed something quite spectacularly recently, but can’t remember what it is.
Steven Pinker makes the point that all verbed nouns are regular. Although ‘fly out to center’ (in baseball, so I’ll use ‘center’) is based on the irregular verb fly, this usage is a new verb based on a noun based on the original verb, so the batter always ‘flied out to center’. He says the only person who ever ‘flew out to center’ was Superman.
Or in ice hockey, high-sticked and not *high-stuck.
A baseball example (including the ‘center’ spelling) was almost too much for me. I wasn’t going to add an ice-hockey example as well. (NB, ice-hockey. For me ‘hockey’ is field hockey.)
It turns out, Pinker was wrong about that: sportswriters and announcers do say “flew out to center.” It’s not the majority, but it’s not super rare. Here’s Language Log’s investigation.
Thanks for this link; I had missed it at the time. Interested readers should also visit Liberman’s earlier post ‘Systematic irregularization’, which looks at the phenomenon more generally: ‘Sometimes, a morphologically-irregular word form becomes regularized when the word is used in a new way.’
I recently found the expression “synchronized bunnying” as a caption on a post showing two bunnies lying close to each other in exactly the same position. I love it, but I still haven’t succedded in translating (germaning?) this verbed noun into German, my mother tongue.
Hard to do it tidily, I imagine (with my limited German).
A fun fact about bunny: it was a term of endearment (1606) before it was a pet name for a rabbit (1699), if the OED’s dates hold up.
I love these little fun/bun facts and I’m always happy to meet people who love language as much as I do. Some things, however, just can’t be translated such as Santa Paws which is another excellent play of words. Unfortunately the German movie was titled “Santa Pfote” and thus the pun got lost in translation.
Did Santa Paws have Santa Claws?
Haha, that’s a good one too. Yes, being a puppy Santa Paws had Santa Claws.
My English-as-a-second-language-speaker wife very often uses nouns when she should use verbs, but in different ways than you’re discussing here and in ways no English speaker would. For example, she’ll say things like ‘Can you choice what you want to eat?’. I can’t imagine the man in the cartoon saying ‘We need to choice our marketing strategy.
Interestingly, Korean has many verbs made by a noun + a verb which basically means ‘do’, so sarang-haeyo is essentially ‘(I) love-do (you)’. Google Translate tells me that there are two Korean verbs for ‘choose’, one of which is in this form and the other of which is a ‘real verb’ (non-technical term). English verbs borrowed into Korean often take the form noun + haeyo, so shawo-haeyo (shower – is that a noun or a verb?) and, strangely, shoping-heayo (shopping > I shop, I go shopping, I do the shopping).
I recently verbed a proper noun. I described getting rid of something as Marie-Kondoing it out of my life.
Excellent. That one’s gained a lot of momentum in recent years, as have variants like to KonMari, which was added to Macmillan’s crowd-sourced Open Dictionary in 2016.
One I saw at the weekend, in James Ellroy’s Destination: Morgue!: